The Ballad of Ricky and Angel Files
by Quatermass
Summary: A collection of in-universe files and one-shots from the Ballad of Ricky and Angel, starting with files that Hyperion President Blake is giving a hired mercenary...
1. Foreword

**FOREWORD**

As I write this, I am still writing the final chapters of _You've Got to Hide Your Love Away_. However, having finished the epilogue to that particular story, I've decided to make a start on _The Ballad of Ricky and Angel Files_. This is less a story per se than it is a collection of files and omakes relating to the story. However, I've decided to make part of it interesting at least by using a framing story. Hence the initial chapter, of the meeting between Blake and a certain character.

These will be a somewhat eclectic collection of stories and files and other things, but I'm hoping to add to the universe of the Ballad of Ricky and Angel, as well as give you a taste of things to come. I'm working on Welcome to the Jungle now, and hopefully, you guys will enjoy it. But for the time being, enjoy this little interlude.

Anyway, onto the usual disclaimers. Firstly, as is usual for my fanfics, there will be annotations. Don't like, well, tough.

Secondly, this is M-rated for coarse language, violence, and sexual references.

Finally, the following is a fan-written work. The _Borderlands_ series is the property of 2K Games, Gearbox, and whoever else I have failed to mention. Please, support the official release. Otherwise, they'll hire Athena to take you out.


	2. Prelude: Client and Employer

**PRELUDE:**

 **CLIENT AND EMPLOYER**

The dapper, slender man in the well-tailored suit walked down the corridor to his office with precise steps. Yes, his office now, not that bullying boor Tassiter's, nor that murderous moron Jack's. _His_ office. An office in the still-being-constructed city of Opportunity, so it actually hadn't been used by the former, but it was less about the physical office, and more about the position it entailed. President of Hyperion, the corporation that had the largest presence on Pandora now.

The purge of Hyperion was, of course, far from complete, and it may never be in his lifetime. Handsome Jack, in his relatively short tenure at the top, had sunk his claws in deep. And there were still too many who idolised him, despite what the once lowly computer programmer had done.

But Hyperion, even in the two months since Jack had been executed by the Crimson Raiders, or more precisely, Doctor Richard Snyder, had started to recover. True, the loss of Angel was an inconvenience, but not an insurmountable one by any means. Better to keep her as a willing troubleshooter for the Hyperion network than imprisoned in Control Core Angel.

As he entered the plush office, he smiled, and spoke apparently to nobody. "You are prompt. That is good. Allow me to introduce myself, despite the redundancy." He turned to face the intruder, who had been standing near the door. His long, pointed face, beard, and blonde hair styled with two vaguely demonic points rising from them made him look a little diabolical. However, the man was no devil, merely being something somewhat more mundane. "I am Jeffrey Blake, President of Hyperion."

 **JEFFREY BLAKE AS**

 **PRESIDENT OF HYPERION**

 **Believe It Or Not, He's Better than Handsome Jack**

The woman who strode forward had rugged, well-worn clothing, as well as a hood, currently thrown back. Blue hair and blue eyes stared impassively at Blake. Without showing any offence at the lack of response, Blake said, "And you are former Lance Assassin from Atlas' Crimson Lance and current mercenary, Athena. It's a pleasure to make your acquaintance."

"It's not mutual," the woman said quietly.

 **ATHENA AS**

 **THE GLADIATOR**

 **Dark Assassin. Heart of Gold(** **1)** **.**

"I can't interest you in a drink, then?" Blake asked, gesturing towards a cabinet.

"No. I want details about the job. I'm only here because you mentioned significant remuneration. Your words rather than mine," Athena said coldly.

"My intelligence suggested that Miss Springs is trying to get you out of that line of work," Blake said mildly. "If you want, she can come with you to…" Blake cleared his throat, and then said, with a mild expression of annoyance, "…the Badass Crater of Badassitude."

"So this is to do with Torgue's tournament?" Athena said, trying to tamp down her annoyance at Blake bringing up Janey, her lover.

"A new Vault always interests Hyperion," Blake said. "In our treaty with Sanctuary, we agreed not to do anything to the Vault of the Warrior, save for sending archaeologists and scientists to investigate it. I believe Tannis is champing at the bit to go once it is finally fully excavated. That being said, she learned of a new Vault, as you saw in the broadcast. Under the treaty, Roland contacted me about this new Vault. Someone must've leaked information to Torgue, though thankfully, Mr Torgue's intentions seem to be purely for holding a tournament. The man is a genius when it comes to explosive weapons and flair, but little else."

"And you want me to secure the Vault and its weapons?"

"That is the potential end result, but in fact your task is somewhat different. Tell me, do you know what happened around the events of Jack's death?"

"Of course. The ECHOnet was buzzing with it. Besides the Vault Hunters, they say it was also the Guardian Angel, who was both a Siren and Jack's daughter, as well as a former Hyperion scientist. Snyder, I think his name was. I heard a rumour that Tim might have gotten involved."

"Ah, yes. Mr Lawrence did indeed get involved, during the Crimson Raiders' attacks on Opportunity. He defected to the Raiders. Given what Jack himself turned into, well…" Blake shrugged. "You were there when it happened."

Athena nodded. She wasn't the only one who was there, and Jack wasn't the only one who changed for the worse. She remembered Nisha Kadam, who eventually became Jack's lackey in Lynchwood, and Wilhelm, the infamous cyborg mercenary who became Jack's most brutal enforcer. Claptrap was abandoned and left for dead, while Lady Hammerlock had gone her separate way from the others.

She wondered, had Lilith not done what she did, would Jack have turned out as bad? Or would Jack have slid down a slope into madness and evil anyway? He was well on the way there, she wasn't blind.

"Officially, you are there to act as bodyguards to two Hyperion assets, as well as to participate in the tournament. Unofficially, you will be, once more, a Vault Hunter working for Hyperion," Blake said. He slid over a photograph of a pair of young people.

Athena recognised one of them straight away. She was the Guardian Angel, although unlike the digitised ECHO feeds she had seen before, this image was definitely taken in reality. The girl was in her twenties, her hair all but shaved on one temple, and long on the other side. Her eyes were a piercing blue, but lined with haggard circles that made her look older than she was. Despite this, she was smiling at the young man with his arm around her shoulders.

The young man had a long face, red hair, and tired, haunted green eyes. A few features, like the pointed chin, reminded Athena vaguely of Jack. But this guy looked a bit like a scarecrow, compared to the more conventionally attractive Jack. He looked familiar too, and Athena took a moment to remember. It was in the aftermath of that whole Elpis business, when Jack had first donned the mask, and had invited them to tour some of his facilities. The young man had a beard then, and had been called 'Dick' by Jack a lot, much to the young man's chagrin. He was about the same age as Angel. She remembered his Australian twang, like so many on Elpis, though his was a bit more polished.

"The woman is Angel Clarke(2), Jack's daughter, a Siren, and, of course, formerly the Guardian Angel. The young man is Doctor Richard Snyder, originally Hyperion's top expert on Sirens, as well as a gifted biologist and toxicologist, specialising in the effects of Eridium. They are currently Hyperion's liaisons with Sanctuary and the Crimson Raiders. You could say that they are Hyperion's ambassadors to the Crimson Raiders. They fought alongside Vault Hunters old and new to stop Jack."

"I'm a little surprised that you let them get off so easily," Athena mused.

"There were a few reasons for that. The first, and most important, is that Jack's actions were beginning to endanger Hyperion. Because of his petulant actions, millions of dollars of damage was done to Opportunity alone, never mind the cost in Loader manufacture and personnel who were commanded to stop the Vault Hunters, no matter what. The second is that destroying Sanctuary would only increase the resistance against Hyperion, whereas a treaty of mutual benefit would help both. Should, for example, your former employers at Atlas decide to make a move, Hyperion could count on the Crimson Raiders to help. The third is that in their current roles, they do far more good for Hyperion than they have before. The fourth is, frankly, Angel threatened to shut off life support to as many Hyperion facilities as she could, and self-destruct the rest. I personally think she was bluffing, as she is somewhat more moral than her father, but she definitely has the capability," Blake said. "Even outside the cage her father made for her, her power over electronics is astonishing. Better to have one like her as a willing ally than as a bitter enemy."

Athena nodded. "Smart."

"I still have spies in Sanctuary, though. It's how I got some of the files I'm going to give you," Blake said. "Admittedly, Snyder has some unflattering comments to make about me, as well as some others, but I can weather that. His usefulness far exceeds his insolence."

Athena would have snorted if she felt like it. But instead, she accepted the files she was given, and began to read...

 **PRELUDE ANNOTATIONS:**

 **Yes, ladies and gentlemen, Athena will be making a comeback in** ** _Welcome to the Jungle_** **, and so too will Janey Springs!**

 **I was originally intending to do this as a collection of in-universe files and the like without any framing story, but I decided that it'd be a bit more interesting to have a framing story. Hope you like it.**

 **1\. Having just started playing the Pre-Sequel, I was impressed by Janey's character (even if her Aussie accent is a bit cod, despite the actress apparently being an Aussie). That is why I adapted her character splash's subtitle for Athena's own, to reflect their relationship.**

 **2\. As mentioned before, I have given Angel (and Handsome Jack) the last name of 'Clarke', in honour of Dameon Clarke, the voice actor for Handsome Jack.**


	3. File 1: Ricky and Angel Dossiers

**FILE 1:**

 **RICKY AND ANGEL DOSSIERS**

 _Hyperion Personnel File. Confidential. Do not reproduce except on authorisation from Class B personnel or higher._

 _Revised on orders of President Blake._

NAME: Doctor Richard Snyder

AGE: 24

DATE OF BIRTH: November 13(1)

BIRTHPLACE: Elpis, though his family frequently moved between Elpis and Pandora before and after birth(2).

RELIGION: Has listed himself variously as agnostic, atheist, misotheist, and Pastafarian.

QUALIFICATIONS: Bachelor's Degree in Biology. Master's Degree in Biology, with a minor in Environmental Toxicology. Doctorate in Environmental Toxicology. Has considerable knowledge of Pandoran wildlife, as well as Sirens.

PHYSICAL OR MENTAL CONDITIONS: Asperger's Syndrome. Super-Cognitive Interpretation Zone (colloquially known as Sci-Zone). Chronic but mild depression. Eridium-based teratological effects on the brain.

NOTED ABILITIES: While in Sci-Zone, able to target weaknesses in battle. Outside battle, it gives him tremendous insight, at the cost of suppressing his morality.

NOTED ACHIEVEMENTS: Has been single-handedly responsible for a number of Hyperion medical breakthroughs, including a new treatment for skull-shivers, partly impelled by his parents death, which triggered a Sci-Zone episode (see Incident Report RS-79). Also responsible for the death of John 'Handsome Jack' Clarke and Sheriff Nisha Kadam of Lynchwood.

AFFILIATIONS: Hyperion, Crimson Raiders.

KNOWN ASSOCIATES: Key personnel of the Crimson Raiders (see files CR1-4, VH1-6, along with MH1, AH1, and TD1(3)), Angel Clarke, Timothy Lawrence, Dave Jones (deceased).

ASSESSMENT: Due to his treatment at the hands of Handsome Jack, Snyder is understandably wary of an alliance with Hyperion, but is willing to work with us again, as long as no treachery occurs. Although rather skittish in battle, his quick thinking and reflexes have saved him frequently, as has the Sci-Zone. The subject is intelligent, but a little emotionally volatile, even outside the Sci-Zone. By Pandora standards, this makes him surprisingly mundane, at least without the Sci-Zone. However, his empathy for others has won the Crimson Raiders over, making him a good representative of Hyperion, even if he is as iconoclastic as the Crimson Raiders.

One note in particular: he has a strong relationship with Angel Clarke. Although this could be considered leverage, it was Snyder who formulated the critical parts of a plan to extract Angel from Control Core Angel. Threatening Angel would be like waking a Rakk Hive: he may not be invincible, but it is better not to cause the trouble in the first place.

NAME: Angel Clarke (is married to Doctor Richard Snyder, but has chosen to keep her surname)

AGE: 24

DATE OF BIRTH: February 1(4)

BIRTHPLACE: Unknown: her father has used significant information control to erase many details regarding her.

RELIGION: Declined to answer.

QUALIFICATIONS: Has apparently a number of qualifications (under aliases) from ECHOnet teaching courses, ranging from reputable degrees, to diploma mill certificates, apparently obtained out of boredom while confined to Control Core Angel. However, is noted to have both long-term experience and even degrees in computer programming. Has considerable knowledge of Hyperion's workings.

PHYSICAL OR MENTAL CONDITIONS: What little information that has been released about her medical records after being freed suggest that she needs Eridium continually fed into her body. Withdrawal would be swiftly fatal. Mental conditions unknown, but conditions caused by imprisonment by father may include PTSD.

ABILITIES: Angel Clarke is a Siren with technopathic abilities, as well as recently-revealed electrical projection abilities.

NOTED ACHIEVEMENTS: Helped the Vault Hunters open the Vault of the Destroyer, as well as help engineer the attack on New Haven. After release, worked with President Blake to secure a treaty between Hyperion and the Crimson Raiders.

KNOWN ASSOCIATES: Key personnel of the Crimson Raiders (see files CR1-2, VH1-6, along with MH1, AH1, and TD1), Timothy Lawrence, and Doctor Richard Snyder.

ASSESSMENT: Handsome Jack's crimes against his own daughter have gouged deep wounds. Angel did take the initiative to negotiate with Hyperion, however, and she was the first to recognise the necessity for the current treaty. Her usefulness as a hacker should not be underestimated, but her ability in battle is also surprisingly good. Though physically frail, she is accurate with weapons, and her newly-discovered electrical projection abilities put any opponent at a disadvantage. And her ability to hack almost any computer system instinctively means that she can potentially be one of Hyperion's greatest assets…or its greatest threats, should she take umbrage.

 **FILE 1 ANNOTATIONS:**

 **1\. This is the date of birth of Robert Louis Stevenson, the author of** ** _Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde_** **(it should have a 'the' at the beginning, I know, but that's how the original story was titled). Given Snyder's problems with the Sci-Zone, well, it seemed appropriate.**

 **2\. I will be expanding upon this in** ** _Welcome to the Jungle_** **, but given how a lot of characters on Elpis have Aussie accents in the Pre-Sequel, I felt that Snyder and his family had ties there.**

 **3\. 'CR' stands for 'Crimson Raiders', with 1 being Roland, 2 being Lilith, 3 being Mordecai, and 4 being Brick. 'VH' stands for the current Vault Hunters. 'MH1' stands for 'Moxxi Hodunk', 'AH1' stands for 'Alistair Hammerlock', and 'TD1' stands for 'Tina Doe', or Tiny Tina.**

 **4\. This being the birthdate of Britanni Johnson, the live-action footage model for Angel.**


	4. File 2: Gaige's ECHO Log Transcript

**FILE 2:**

 **GAIGE'S ECHO LOG TRANSCRIPT: RICKY AND ANGEL EDITION**

GAIGE: Greetings, faithful subscribers! Today's a special day. It's the day you've been waiting for, that you've been demanding. The latest in my Crimson Raiders profiles series. Yesterday, we did the profile with Maya. Got more than a few negative comments from Athenas, all from former members of the Order of the Impending Storm…anyway, that's not what we're here for today! I've got two very special guests. You've heard about them, and even from them a couple of times, but it's time to have them speak in their own words. Now, guys, if you don't mind introducing yourselves…

SNYDER: Umm…two questions, Gaige. One, can I swear with impunity?

GAIGE: Yep. It's got an advisory.

SNYDER: Okay. Two, did you talk to Blake?

GAIGE: Yeah. He's cool with it. Besides, he reckons this would be a good opportunity for the ECHOnet to get to know two of the key people in the fight against Jack.

SNYDER: (sarcastically) Oh, _marvellous_. Is this like painting a bullseye on my groin and saying 'please kick here'?

ANGEL: Ricky, it's not like that.

GAIGE: Anyway, if you wouldn't mind introducing yourselves?

SNYDER: (resigned sigh) Very well. Hello, people of the ECHOnet. I'm Doctor Richard Snyder, biologist, sufferer from the Sci-Zone, and killer of Handsome Jack.

ANGEL: That was well done, Ricky. Anyway, I'm Angel Clarke, though many of you might know me as the Guardian Angel. That's right, I'm not an AI. I am a Siren, and Handsome Jack's daughter. It's a very long story. I'm also Ricky's wife now.

GAIGE: Okay, well, let's start with you, Doc. The Sci-Zone isn't that well-known a condition, so could you please elaborate?

SNYDER: (resigned sigh) Fine. Okay, well, the Sci-Zone is an acronym for Super-Cognitive Interpretation Zone. Of course, it has a shitload of nicknames, but the most appropriate one is the Spark. That came from an old comic series called _Girl Genius_ , about mad scientists who, when their gift went into overdrive, they sort of got loud and hammy, tended to overlook morality, that sort of thing. Long story short, when it triggers, I sort of become a mad scientist temporarily. I begin yelling about things being 'for science'. A few people have gotten sick of it, really. It's pretty scary for me, but it was useful when fighting the various lunatics of Pandora: I can target weaknesses pretty easily when in the Sci-Zone.

GAIGE: Okay, and that ties into my next question: how did you two meet?

SNYDER: It was on Elpis, at some medical specialist, can't remember the name of it now. I was only six years old. Anyway, I meet this cute girl with tattoos. I was curious, as I thought tattoos would have been on older people, but she told me that they weren't. It sort of sparked off a deep interest in Sirens. We became friends, even though my condition tended to alienate other people. And then…

ANGEL: And then, Dad happened. I had trouble controlling my abilities, that was true enough. I'd scared my parents more than once when they got out of control, and I once accidentally shut off life-support to half of Concordia. But Dad wanted to exploit my abilities, and forced me into a control system. At first, he made out that I had accidentally killed my mother, but my mother was actually still alive, and was trying to get me out of there. Jack took control of me, and forced me to commit matricide using a Loader.

GAIGE: …Shit. Well, we all knew Handsome Jack was a douche, but to start so early…

ANGEL: I watched him over the years. There was still, debatably, a good man beneath it, but his evil started early. The Elpis incident was the turning point, but you also have to realise he was responsible, in part, for the first Vault incident.

GAIGE: Yeah, the Vault of the Destroyer, filled with, and I'm quoting Marcus' popular turn of phrase here, 'tentacles and disappointment'. So, half of the ECHOnet, really. So, why did you help Jack manipulate the Vault Hunters, the first ones?

ANGEL: Well, I was already fixed with a control collar. Jack wanted a few things. First, he wanted to harness some part of the Destroyer itself. It's not well-known, but once, Helios' top weapon was actually the Destroyer's eye, albeit modified. Secondly, he wanted the Eridium within, as the Vault's opening caused Eridium seams to open up around Pandora. Thirdly, he knew that Atlas would get decimated trying to deal with the Vault. Finally, he wanted to get the Vault Key together.

GAIGE: But he was just a programmer at the time.

ANGEL: He also had big ambitions, and he was also in charge of satellite surveillance for Hyperion. Of course, Tassiter, his predecessor as President of Hyperion, wasn't much better. Tassiter was an arrogant prick who didn't give a damn about his workers.

SNYDER: Ugh, don't remind me. Tassiter came round to taunt me a few times after I emerged from the Sci-Zone, saying that nobody else but Hyperion would dare hire a monster like me. Of course, Jack used the same line. Pricks.

ANGEL: Anyway, Jack had me manipulate the Vault Hunters covertly, as part of his hunch involving the Vault. He had some better sources than Tannis about what the Vault contained. Where he got that information, even I don't know. He was good with information control. I'd come to view Roland, Lilith, Mordecai and Brick as friends during that whole saga, and it pained me to have to lie to them. It was even worse when Jack had me betray them at New Haven, when he sent Wilhelm in to kill them.

SNYDER: God, Wilhelm was a piece of work. I mean, I only knew him for a year or two before he died, but he was one of those people that stay with you in your nightmares. Even before he went overboard with his cybernetics and became a human Loader, he was fucking scary, and the only person who could stop me in the Sci-Zone. There was one funny thing about him, though: those two drones he used to have, with those gung-ho voices. Wolf and Saint, I think he called them.

GAIGE: Well, Doc, did you know any of the other Elpis Vault Hunters?

SNYDER: I never met Lady Hammerlock. The others I did meet. Claptrap I only met during this whole mess with Jack sending me to die, and I only met Athena briefly when Jack took her on a tour of Hyperion facilities. But Timothy Lawrence, aka Jack's double, I actually knew at university. Poor bastard got turned into Jack to pay off his student loans. Thankfully, he has an understanding woman now. Nisha Kadam, aka the late Sheriff of Lynchwood, I met a few times. She was a scary bloody woman. She got off on violence. (shudders)

GAIGE: Well, we know how well that turned out. And my faithful subscribers can look back on my previous ECHO logs to learn about how Doc and Angel got together. Anyway, some guy wanted me to go the 'Kakashi Hatake(1)' route of asking you guys about things. You know, name, age, likes, dislikes, hobbies and dreams. So, Doc, you wanna go first?

SNYDER: Yeah, sure, why not? I already gave my name. I'm 24, I like retro music, games, and TV and reading, along with Sirens. Hell, I'm married to one. Dislikes, well, it's a long list, but Jack topped the list. Getting shot at and bastards of various kinds top the list now. My hobbies are reading and doing scientific research, as well as hanging out with, well, I guess you could call the Vault Hunters my friends now. Dreams? Well, one of them's already been fulfilled: I'm with Angel now. I guess my biggest dream now is to learn as much as I can about Sirens.

GAIGE: Okay, your turn, Angel.

ANGEL: Okay. I'm 24 years old. Likes? hesitates Well, funnily enough, I like Claptrap robots, believe it or not.

SNYDER: (incredulously) What?

ANGEL: There's something endearing about them. Okay, they're a little annoying, but…anyway, I also like _Bunkers and Badasses_ , computer programming, and walks in the sun. It's been only a short while since I could do _that_ again. Dislikes? Well, like Ricky said, Dad topped the list until he was killed. I really hate being helpless and being controlled. Oh, and not knowing things. So Zer0's a bit of a pain in that regard. Hobbies? Well, I mentioned them under my likes. I also like to experiment with hacking. As for dreams, well, like Ricky, one of my biggest was fulfilled. Actually, two of them: I'm free from Control Core Angel, and I'm with him. I think that if I have a dream now, it's that Pandora will be a good place for anyone and everyone one day.

GAIGE: Wow, well said, Angel. Okay, well, what about favourite music tracks?

SNYDER: Ooh, tough. I mean, I like _Hooked on a Feeling_ by Blue Swede, the _Doctor Who_ theme by Ron Grainer, and _Nuclear_ by Mike Oldfield. But I like an eclectic bunch of songs from soundtracks, that sort of thing.

GAIGE: Wow, old school. And you, Angel?

ANGEL: I like classical stuff. _Moonlight Sonata_ , Holst's _The Planets_ , _The Sorcerer's Apprentice_ , that sort of thing.

GAIGE: (giggles) Even older school. Okay, how about best achievement?

SNYDER: Oooh, tough. (hums pensively) I think there's two that spring to mind: saving Angel from Control Core Angel, though that was very much a team effort, and Rick-Rolling Jack.

ANGEL: Making friends with the Vault Hunters, even after what happened to New Haven and the Sanctuary bombardment. Oh, and helping Tim pretend to be Jack.

GAIGE: (laughs) Yeah, that was funny, wasn't it? He was scarily good as Jack, wasn't he?

ANGEL: (laughing softly) Gaige, I wish he was my father instead of my real father. Tim…well, he's a decent guy. He's like how I think Dad should have been. Nice, a bit of a dork, but funny and caring.

SNYDER: Yeah. He's like Jack when I knew him as Uncle John. It's weird, thinking of Jack as an honorary uncle. But anyway, Dr Zed and I are working to try and help make Tim more comfortable. Angel has found out that she could deactivate the bomb in Tim's face, so he could remove Jack's face if he really wanted to now. As it is, he's made his peace with looking like Jack, and so have the others. He's more worried about his voice modulator potentially causing him grief: that's what his doctor said when he first got the operations. Thankfully, Dr Zed has a newer model ready, so here's hoping we can help him.

GAIGE: Mmm-hmm. Oh, and there's another favourite thing question someone wanted to ask: favourite weapons manufacturer.

SNYDER: Easy. I'm a Maliwan guy. Before I joined the Vault Hunters, I ordered a custom Maliwan pistol that could switch between elements. I hadn't shot anyone before, but I knew enough about Pandora to know that you shouldn't go unarmed. And Maya was kind enough to give me her own Maliwan SMG that fired electric bullets after she found another one.

ANGEL: Hmm, tough. In terms of what I'd actually use in combat, it'd be, funnily enough, Hyperion. I prefer to fight from a distance you see, and that's one thing Hyperion weapons excel in: accuracy. That being said, I have a bit of a guilty pleasure for Torgue weaponry. The nomenclature…I mean, the naming of these guns is very crude, but it's got a sense of fun. Plus, explosive rounds.

SNYDER: I guess Tina rubbed off on you.

ANGEL: (chuckles) She's endearing.

SNYDER: (chuckles) Yeah, she is. More than a little… _eccentric_ , but she's a good girl. sighs Pity we couldn't take Jack to one of her tea parties, really. But we didn't want him getting loose(2).

GAIGE: Okay, well, one last question, for you specifically, Doc. People asked, what was it like to kill Handsome Jack? (several seconds of silence) Uhh, okay, I understand if you're uncomfortable about it.

SNYDER: No, no, it's fine. sigh It was… _nothing_. I didn't feel joy or elation. Hell, I didn't even feel relief, which is what I thought I would. I just felt tired and empty. Dead inside. Oh don't get me wrong, as time went by, I felt relief. I felt relief that he was no longer hunting Angel and me down. But on that day…you have to realise that I shot two unarmed people in cold blood. I had killed people before, but that was in the heat of battle(3). But these two people had caused a lot of grief, especially Jack. Anyway, I wanted to do it myself, if only to know for sure that the nightmare had ended. I'm not proud of killing Jack, as an achievement. Like I said, it was killing an unarmed man in cold blood. Sure, he was a bastard, and letting him live would have been a mistake, but…sorry, I can't go on.

ANGEL: (soothingly) It's alright, Ricky.

GAIGE: Yeah, sorry I asked you that, Doc. Anyway, do you have any last words for the listeners?

SNYDER: Hmmm…something pithy, I guess.

ANGEL: I'll go first, Ricky. Never hold onto preconceptions about your life. Things can change for the better. And there is always at least one person who believes in you, even if you don't believe in yourself.

SNYDER: Okay, my turn. Ummm…the universe is a cruel, harsh place, and life has no innate meaning. That being said, there's no reason you can't impose one of your own. Try and enjoy your life as best as you can, and enjoy it with the company of family and friends. Happy endings don't happen like they do in fairytales, but sometimes, you can earn them.

GAIGE: Well, that's interesting. Doc, Angel, thanks for being here. Tune in next time for my interview with Dr Lilith Cashlin, aka the Firehawk. Gaige, Mechromancer and Vault Hunter, signing off.

 **FILE 2 ANNOTATIONS:**

 **I was inspired to do this chapter by both the official ECHO logs done by Gaige, as well as the fanfic continuation of them, written by Discar. It's pretty good.** ** _Gaige's ECHO Logs_** **by Discar.**

 **1\. Kakashi Hatake being, obviously, the leader of the ninja team Naruto gets put into in** ** _Naruto_** **. I like Kakashi.**

 **2\. I wanted to have Jack die at one of Tina's birthday parties, but I decided against it for a couple of reasons, the biggest one being that I didn't want Jack potentially getting loose.**

 **3\. Snyder deliberately omits that he killed people while in the Sci-Zone.**


	5. File 3: The Sci-Zone for Beginners

**FILE 3:**

 **THE SCI-ZONE FOR BEGINNERS**

( _Quick author's note at the beginning: there'll be in-character annotations as Jack, which will be marked with asterisks rather than numbers. Imagine he's hand-written notes over the page_ )

REPORT TO HANDSOME JACK REGARDING THE SCI-ZONE (VERSION 2)

BY DOCTOR HEATHER SAMUELS(1)

Sir, as you requested, I've gone back over my original report and heavily revised it. I still think that trimming out the vital information was a mistake: you pride yourself as a man who values information*. Anyway, I've included what I know about the Sci-Zone, as well as my personal knowledge of Snyder.

There's frankly little known about the Sci-Zone. What little there is known, I have tried to make more digestible, given that this seems to be the scientific paper's equivalent of caecal pellets**.

The Sci-Zone is a colloquial term standing for Super-Cognitive Interpretation Zone, relating to how sufferers have, while in the throes of an attack, have extremely heightened perceptive abilities and swift decision-making abilities. They also lose their morality to a great degree, and are notably…hammy, to use the colloquial term.

Although the mechanism by which the Sci-Zone occurs is still poorly understood, it seems to involve multiple parts of the brain. The Sci-Zone is often triggered by severe negative emotion, with fear, anger, and grief being notable triggers. The sympathetic nervous system, the one that causes the adrenaline rush, is also a key factor: adrenaline and other catecholamines are thought to be linked***.

Snyder is the first person to have had his brain scanned while in the Sci-Zone and out of it, and the results are interesting. There is decreased activity in the amygdala and other parts of the limbic system. In fact, the areas act as if Snyder suddenly becomes a sociopath****. This is a rather incomplete analogy, as those he is on good terms with, he will display small empathic responses.

Other parts that get activated are something of a mystery still, but I believe that they are related to his heightened perception during the Sci-Zone. In discussion with me, Snyder says that he can see biological weaknesses quite easily while in the Sci-Zone. He finds the concept understandably disturbing outside the Sci-Zone. However, he draws an analogy with the heightened perception to Doctor Joseph Bell and his famous inductive reasoning abilities. Bell was the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes, and had made many extraordinary observations about his patients, though it should be called _inductive_ reasoning, and not deductive*****(2).

The cause of the Sci-Zone seems to be teratogenic rather than genetic. Simply put, those who have such attacks generally have been exposed to certain chemicals or elements while in the womb. It was confirmed that Snyder's mother, Sarah Snyder, was exposed to a small but significant Eridium in an accident while on consultation work with Dahl on behalf of Hyperion. While not all sufferers from the Sci-Zone have encountered pre-natal Eridium exposure (obviously, given the relative rarity of the substance prior to the Vault incident), similar substances were often linked. And the Psychos of Pandora are thought to have Eridium exposure that renders them insane and psychopathic.

There are a variety of treatments for the Sci-Zone. There are at least three known oral drugs (and I KNOW that you are chuckling at that, sir******) and one prototype in your biology department that can actually be delivered in an aerosol form. The latter is still in clinical trials, though, as there may be dangerous side effects, and yes, there are side-effects worse than having a near-lunatic scientist running around. However, Snyder has recently discontinued use of the drug he was taking, apparently on your orders. According to him, the last time he had an attack, you set that cyborg Enforcer on him. Wilhelm, was it? ******* I should remind you that Snyder is not a performing animal, nor is he to be treated like one. If you feel the need to stop him during one of his attacks, then you could use a simple anaesthetic gas pumped through the ventilation systems********.

That is all I have to say on the Sci-Zone, unless you wish for more detailed and accurate assessment.

PS. On a more personal note, I haven't heard from my wife lately. Have you already moved her to our quarters at the Preserve?*********

DOCTOR HEATHER SAMUELS

JACK'S COMMENTS

*Sammy, there's information, and then there's long-winded babble. If you're smart enough to say these words, you're smart enough to render them a bit more palatable for the guy who writes your checks.

**I looked that up! What the hell does _rabbit shit_ have to do with it(3)?!

***Again with the big words. Still, that'd be a helluva word for Scrabble, if they've got it in the dictionary.

****And bloody hammy to boot. He's like one of those Psychos. I have expected him to scream "SEEEEMENNNN!(4)"

*****Wait, wait, wait, there was a real guy who was the basis of Sherlock Holmes? That is easily the most awesome thing you have ever told me, Sammy.

******I'm more classy than that(5).

*******Ah, that was a funny day. Luckily, I have the video recorded so I can watch it over and over again.

********Meh, Wilhelm's funner.

*********Oh, she's gonna be SO surprised. :P

 **FILE 3 ANNOTATIONS:**

 **This report, obviously, is set shortly before Dr Samuels works at the Wildlife Exploitation Preserve. Snyder is still in the process of getting his PhD, hence why he is referred to as such. This is set not long after the events of the Pre-Sequel as well, so maybe two years before** ** _Borderlands 2_** **, give or take. I dunno what the chronology is.**

 **1\. This wasn't on the Borderlands Wiki, but when I punched in Dr Samuels into Google (along with** ** _Borderlands_** **, obviously), this came up in the results. Dunno whether it's a fan name or not, but I'm going with it.**

 **2\. Despite what Holmes would have you think, this is actually what he uses. And yes, Dr Bell was a real person.**

 **3\. Caecal pellets (or caecotropes) are basically rabbit crap that they actually eat again, believe it or not. The reason why Samuels uses this analogy is because rabbits eat caecal pellets because it is semi-digested food that they can get more nutrients from. Samuels is saying, in effect, that Jack is getting pre-digested information (as well as saying, obliquely, that Jack's request is full of shit). Jack, while intelligent, has missed the point spectacularly.**

 **4\. One of the infamous catch-cries of the Psychos.**

 **5\. No, he isn't. He was chuckling.**


	6. File 4: Snyder on the Second Generation

**FILE 4:**

 **THE SNYDER FILES FACSIMILES: THOUGHTS ON THE SECOND-GENERATION VAULT HUNTERS**

( _Note: This and the following Snyder Files are facsimiles of the original, procured for President Blake by Hyperion's spies within Sanctuary_ )

After so long travelling with them, I think perhaps I should gather my thoughts on them. It's probably best that I write this down rather than use ECHO recorders.

Originally, I was sent to Pandora, and to the Vault Hunters specifically, as Vault Hunter Attaché Associate. Jack dangled the presence of a Siren in front of me as an incentive. I was wary of them, and they were suspicious of me. Of course, over time, they became comrades. A few of them even became friends, something I would never have expected. Vault Hunters are treasure hunters and fortune seekers of the modern age, and are varied in their nature and morality, though the latter has to be somewhat flexible, especially considering that this is Pandora, a world infamous for its lawlessness.

I'll note down some impressions I got in the month or so since I first met them.

* * *

NAME: Axton.

AGE: 26.

NOTES: If there's a member of the Vault Hunters I personally dislike more than any other, then it's Axton. Don't get me wrong, in combat, he's pretty damn good, handy with just about any weapon from a pistol to a rocket launcher, and his sentry turret is a force to be reckoned with in battle. But there's a good reason he was kicked out of the Dahl military.

He's a bit like those arrogant, cocky characters Nathan Fillion liked to play back in those old TV shows. Skilled, yes, but with an ego to match. He admitted that he nearly got hauled in front of a firing squad by his commanding officer (and wife, or at least currently ex-wife), who retained enough compassion and respect for him to send him in the direction of Pandora. He apparently was picking up bounties around Pandora before Jack, who was using Angel to monitor him, lured him in. At the time, Axton found bounty-hunting too little a challenge. I guess he should have been careful what he wished for.

Axton, in many ways, is like Jack. He likes calling me Dick, and mocking me at many an opportunity. He's nowhere near as bad as Jack: unlike Jack, for all Axton's ego, he does have a sense of morality and justice. But he's also frankly got a mean streak in him.

I have little in common with the man, and he likes to tease people that he considers to be nerdy. I have little more to say about him.

* * *

NAME: Maya

AGE: 25

NOTES: Maya was the carrot that Jack dangled in front of me to get me to liaise with the Vault Hunters. After all, she was a Siren. The time we spent together, after an albeit shaky start, brought me to know her as more than just a Siren.

Her start in life was both fortunate and unfortunate. She never knew her real parents, and while the story she was told by her guardians was that she was left in the care of the Order of the Impending Storm on Athenas when she was an infant, later events suggest a more disturbing possibility: that she was kidnapped from her real parents, or that her real parents were murdered(1). When I broached those theories to her, it didn't seem like it surprised her.

The monks of the Order raised her and trained her. Maya is not only highly intelligent, but she is an excellent combatant. But the monks, or at least their leader, Brother Sophis, had another agenda: using Maya (with her Siren abilities) as a tool of fear. Sophis' condescending attitude and refusal to let her leave the Order to investigate her own heritage wore on her. She rebelled when Brother Sophis ordered her to execute a man whose only crime was to be late with his tithe, and who was terrified of Maya. Appalled, Maya killed Sophis, and left the Order. Surprisingly, some of the Order actually helped her leave. She came to Pandora. And that's where we met. In fact, one of her first acts was to use her Phaselock abilities on me and interrogate me when Hyperion's Loaders turned on us.

Over time, though, despite my admitting a scientific interest in Sirens, we grew to like each other. I think it helps that we're both intellectuals: Maya often loves reading in her downtime, and we sometimes discuss various scientific and philosophical issues. She also manages a serenity and grace at times that nobody else on Pandora can. But in battle, she's a force of nature: she can use her Phaselock to trap enemies temporarily and take them out of battle. She can also use it for other things: she saved my life when I fell off Flynt's ship, and used a powered-up version of it as part of my plan to save Angel.

I'm glad to count her as a good friend. Besides, it's better than being her enemy: she can kill people with her mind, after all.

* * *

NAME: Salvador

AGE: 36

NOTES: Salvador is the only actual Pandora native, as far as I can tell, amongst the second generation Vault Hunters. Hell, he didn't even know about the Vault or Hyperion until a Hyperion force invaded his hometown during his execution. Said execution was for massacring a group of men who were threatening his grandmother. Then again, it's not like he needs an excuse: he's got a rap-sheet taller than he is (his growth was stunted by steroid abuse).

Salvador is probably the stereotype of what people would think a Vault Hunter is like: loud, violent, and obsessed with loot and plunder. Curiously enough, though, I like him a little more than Axton, as for all his loud and obnoxious nature, he has little pretension. Not that Axton has much, but Axton is cocky, whereas Salvador…well, what you see is what you get, and he's a short, gun-obsessed powerhouse who is better to have on your side than not. Plus, dual-wielding just about any gun under the sun is pretty awesome, regardless.

* * *

NAME: Zer0

AGE: Buggered if I know

NOTES: As far as I know, there is one, maybe two or three people who know anything about who and/or what Zer0 is. Zer0 himself is obvious, but Tannis has been dropping hints that she knows more than Zer0 would like(2). And I think Maya and Zer0 are in a relationship, though whether she knows any of his secrets, she isn't telling. Angel herself couldn't find much, and considering she was hooked up to the ECHOnet, that's saying a lot. I am certain that he enjoys cultivating a mystique about himself. I doubt that he's human (he has three fingers and a thumb on each hand), and that's about all I'm willing to venture. Alien, cyborg, or robot, hell if I know what he is. In battle, you don't really need to know much, only that he's great with a sword or a sniper rifle, and that he can use a sort of hologram decoy to distract the enemy while he uses a cloaking device to go in for the kill.

He does have some quirks, though. Many times when he speaks anything beyond one or two words, he speaks in haiku. Either he has some sort of computer program ticking away in augmented language centres, or he really is that good. He also sometimes projects emoticons on his helmet, showing an occasional impish air that isn't prevalent in his utterances. He also likes a challenge: this was why he came to Pandora in the first place. A bit like Axton, only Zer0 isn't a dick.

I have to confess, I like Zer0. True, he's an enigmatic ninja assassin who could kill me in my sleep, but the guy's already saved my life twice, and he seems to be a decent guy beneath the mask, whatever he is. While it's hard to get more than a couple of words out of him without him doing a haiku, I'd like to think I have a rapport with him.

( _In different handwriting_ )

 ** _Hide journal better,_**

 ** _Your secret thoughts on display,_**

 ** _Like a streaker's wang._**

 ** _-Zer0._** **:P**

( _Snyder's handwriting_ )

Zer0, what the fuck, mate? So, _you're_ allowed to have secrets, but I'm not?

( _Zer0's handwriting_ )

 ** _Apologies, friend,_**

 ** _Your new station may make you_**

 ** _Hyperion spy._**

 ** _A mere precaution_**

 ** _Better to seek forgiveness._**

 ** _Than ask permission._**

 ** _-Zer0._** **:(**

( _Snyder's handwriting_ )

…Okay, now that you have looked in my journal, I guess you owe me a secret.

( _Zer0's handwriting_ )

 ** _A secret of mine?_**

 ** _A guilty pleasure I have:_**

 **Yu-Gi-Oh! Abridged.**

 **-** ** _Zer0._** **;)**

( _Snyder's handwriting_ )

…I guess that's why you said something about trap cards when activating Decepti0n(3). Ugh, well, you still owe me a few drinks at Moxxi's.

( _Zer0's handwriting_ )

 **:(**

( _Snyder's handwriting_ )

I drink frigging soft drink most of the time, you got off lightly. Imagine if I drank the stuff Hyperion execs like to.

…Wait, scratch that. I know for a fact that Jack used to serve up cheap champagne (as in, adulterated with all sorts of fun stuff like antifreeze) at dinner functions and claim it was Dom Perignon. And I think most of the execs were fooled.

Anyway, where was I?

( _Zer0's handwriting_ )

 ** _A secret you want?_**

 ** _Axton likes Jane Austen Books._**

 ** _Does that satisfy?_**

( _Snyder's handwriting_ )

…Wow. I didn't think he liked that sort of thing. Okay, you're forgiven. For now.

( _Zero's handwriting_ )

 **:/**

( _Snyder's handwriting_ )

Anyway, back to musings.

* * *

NAME: Gaige

AGE: 18

NOTES: I've mentioned Maya and Zer0 being my friends in the second generation of the Vault Hunters, but the Vault Hunter who is probably my best friend is Gaige. It's probably because she feels like she's about my age: Maya, though she's only a year older than me, acts with more poise and maturity. Maya's like the team mother. Gaige is like the little sister I never had, albeit a kickarse little sister who builds lethal robots.

Originally hailing from Eden-5 (which is where I went to university, incidentally), she was something of a prodigy in robotics and engineering. Her family was at least well-off enough for her to build her prototype anti-bullying robot, later known as Deathtrap, but she had a major rival who was richer and bitchier than her by the name of Marcie. Marcie apparently ripped off her design for Deathtrap and sold it to the local police. Gaige still tried to enter it for the local science fair, where her version showed its better engineering, but Marcie had her dad pay off the judges. And then shoved Gaige. Which was a lethal mistake, as Deathtrap saw Marcie as a threat, and attacked her. Apparently Deathtrap was so overpowered, Marcie exploded. Gaige, being all but convicted on the spot of murder, was helped to escape by her father, and she came to Pandora, partly to get away from the law, and partly because she was curious about the Vault. And once there, we met.

While she has regrets over Marcie's death, and over others' death, when fighting in battle, it's almost like she's in the Sci-Zone. She's also got this thing for anarchy (the without-order anarchy, not the without-leaders one), enjoying a bit of chaos. Seriously, she's a bit scary at times. Actually, she's a little like Tiny Tina, only more sane: she likes mayhem and destruction, and 'smashing the system', to use her words. And after gashing her arm while working on Deathtrap, she decided, instead of healing it up, she decided to make a cybernetic arm (to help her summon Deathtrap: she needed a special digistruction device and was having trouble making it portable). That's a special kind of scary. That being said, she is also endearing, and we often speak about ECHOnet shows and old TV: like me, she's a fan of _Doctor Who_ (she sometimes yells "EXTERMINATE!" while summoning Deathtrap) amongst other things. And we also had very understanding parents. I wonder what her parents actually do? I mean, they allowed their daughter to come to Pandora, confident that she would survive, she has basic weapons training, and they were more than willing to help her escape the law on Eden-5.

She might have grown up in privilege, but Gaige is surprisingly well-suited to Pandora. And not just because of her love of mayhem. She's the sort of person who wants to improve this world, and the drive to make it happen. No less so than some of the older Vault Hunters, true, but Gaige has an enthusiasm and energy about it that was long ago wrung out of me. And for all her talk of smashing the system, she's also all for helping people. And she's enjoyable to be around. Plus she's got an interesting ECHO Log series.

* * *

NAME: Krieg

AGE: Have no idea. If my theory about him being Tina's father is true, I'd guess that he was at least in his thirties.

NOTES: It's weird, now that he's dead. I miss the bloodthirsty maniac.

I once heard Hammerlock refer to Krieg as a 'mass of rage and abdominal muscles(4)'. That's a pretty succinct way of describing Krieg. He was one of the Psychos that are infamous for infesting Pandora, complete with a mask. But unlike those Psychos, he was on our side. Okay, he screamed strange utterances about bacon, blood, and battle at the top of his lungs. He was nuttier than a squirrel's hoard and more violent than a Tarantino film. And he had this charming habit of calling me jaundice-sack (I guess it was because I was very much a coward when we first met, and when you're suffering from jaundice, you're yellow). But he was an excellent comrade (God, I'm calling a bloodthirsty psychotic a comrade), and I'd sooner would've had him at my back. Did I fuck up the tenses there?

Anyway, nobody knows much about Krieg's past, though what I discovered at the Wildlife Exploitation Preserve and his reaction suggested that he may very well have been Tiny Tina's father. Whatever past he had before, Eridium-based experimentation (at the hands of my own mentor, Doctor Heather Samuels, though Jack coerced her) drove him insane. He also seemed to have a split personality. I sympathise: the Sci-Zone and DID are different entities, but it feels like I have another personality within the Sci-Zone. The bloodthirsty personality was the one in control, but a sane persona, tired and resigned, would sometimes come through.

Krieg was, for want of a better word, unstoppable, a juggernaut. He was scary and belligerent, and yet…I felt a camaraderie, one that I think he shared. He seemed invincible, but Jack, using an anti-respawn E-Tech gun, proved otherwise. His last words to me, meant as encouragement for my wedding, was "LET THE BLOOD RUSH TO YOUR BRAIN, NOT TO YOUR CHEEKS, OR YOUR PENIS!" Not exactly the most scintillating of last words, but it's nice to think that he cared about me enough, before Jack ganked him.

I'm…not sure I want to write anymore.

( _Zer0's handwriting_ )

 ** _A tormented man_**

 ** _Krieg fought beasts inside and out_**

 ** _He has earned his rest._**

 ** _-Zer0_** **;_;**

( _Snyder's handwriting_ )

…That's pretty good. We should put that on his memorial.

( _Zer0's handwriting_ )

 ** _I already have._**

 ** _-Zer0_** **:(**

 **FILE 4 ANNOTATIONS:**

 **Snyder's thoughts and feelings on his comrades. I hope you liked them.**

 **1\. It occurred to me that Maya may have been told by the monks that she had been left at their temple. I thought, given how corrupt Sophis was, that he may very well have murdered Maya's parents and stolen her from them. She is a Siren, after all. That sort of thing you would kill for.**

 **2\. I think there was an in-universe newspaper mentioned on the Borderlands Wiki that stated that Tannis knew who and what Zer0 was.**

 **3\. I like** ** _Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series_** **. And that whole thing about activating a trap card that Zer0 uses…well, I think, given the impish sense of humour that I have given Zer0, he'd like the Abridged Series more than the original.**

 **4\. The term Hammerlock uses in a promotional trailer for Krieg. It's a good description**


	7. File 5: Snyder on the First Generation

**FILE 5:**

 **THE SNYDER FILES FACSIMILES: THOUGHTS ON THE FIRST-GENERATION VAULT HUNTERS**

I thought I'd jot down some notes about the first generation of Vault Hunters, the ones who effectively form the core of the Crimson Raiders.

NAME: Roland.

AGE: 39(1)

NOTES: I don't like military types, frankly, but there are military men that I can respect. When I first met Roland, I wasn't sure what would happen. I had heard stories from Jack, but by that point, Jack had tried to kill me and the second-generation Vault Hunters. I was wary, though. I didn't know whether, given that I was only freshly turfed out from Hyperion, he'd sentence me to a summary execution. As it was, he was merely suspicious of me, but was more than willing to give me a chance. And for that, I am eternally thankful to him.

I know something of his past now. He used to work for the PMC wing of the Atlas Corporation on Promethea, the Crimson Lance. However, shortly before coming to Pandora, he killed a senior officer and deserted. I've got the feeling, given the horror stories about how the Crimson Lance treated the inhabitants of Pandora, that Roland got qualms about what he was doing. Ironically, Roland would lead the remnants of the Crimson Lance (left behind when Atlas pulled out of Pandora after the Knoxx fiasco), turning them into the Crimson Raiders.

It's interesting to compare Roland and his nemesis, Jack, who were both leaders of men. Roland is relatively introverted (especially compared to Jack), quiet and polite (most of the time). Until he formed the Crimson Raiders, he was also very publicity-shy, whereas Jack embraced the spotlight. In battle, he's somewhat looser with his words and attitude (and he knows how to deploy his Scorpio turret very well, to deleterious effect on the enemy), but, well, you know that old saying 'an officer and a gentleman'? He's like that, a consummate professional.

He's also got some hidden depths to him. He enjoys playing _Bunkers and Badasses_ , which he taught to his adoptive sister/daughter, Tiny Tina. He's in a relationship with Lilith (which, as of this writing, has FINALLY gotten out of Lilith being a mild _tsundere_ and confusing Roland). And I count him as a friend, which is surprising. And he helped me with my admittedly insane plan to save Angel, which could have gone VERY badly for the Crimson Raiders. He's a good man on a world where there's a dearth of them, and it's clear why so many look up to him. Hell, I do.

* * *

NAME: Dr Lilith Cashlin

AGE: 32

NOTES: When we first met, we tried to kill each other. Admittedly, Lilith was (understandably) paranoid about Hyperion, and upon attacking me, I went into the Sci-Zone. But there could have been better ways to meet. She retained her suspicions of me, sending me to Tiny Tina to babysit her. Her reasoning was that I would either show that I was a decent person to Tina, or piss her off enough to become a guest of honour at one of Tina's deadlier tea parties.

Thankfully, it didn't turn out like that. Unfortunately, our relationship (such as it was) didn't improve much. We had an argument over Angel, but it was then that she began to realise how much Angel meant to me, and that Angel, as Jack's daughter (and not an AI as she had believed) was as much a victim of him as those murdered in New Haven. Over an ensuing conversation at Moxxxi's, I let slip (by accident) a few little clues that she used to guess correctly that Angel was a Siren. I think knowing that, and the depth of my feelings for Angel, finally convinced Lilith that I was on the side of the Crimson Raiders. And that Angel may not be their adversary by choice.

It was with her help that I finally formulated the plan to get Angel out of Control Core Angel. Without her Phasewalk ability and Tannis' device (not to mention Maya and Zed's help), I would never have succeeded.

I'm surprised that I can count Lilith as a friend, especially given how we first met. She's pretty much the only other one of the original Vault Hunters (besides Roland) that I can call a friend. And as it happens, despite her elegant and beautiful looks, she's very much a geek: she loves _Bunkers and Badasses_ (she was teased at school for it, and I sympathise), and we sometimes have some conversations about a variety of subjects.

She's fairly infamous as the bounty hunter and vigilante known as the Firehawk, the terror of the Bloodshots. She even got a _cult_ revolving around her at one point. Yeesh.

On a more personal note, I'm glad that Angel's plight (thanks to Jack flooding her system continually with Eridium) has had Lilith scale back on her own usage of Eridium to boost her abilities. Setting bandits and Psychos on fire is pretty awesome, but being a junky to a violet-glowing rock isn't. I'm working with her whenever she is in Sanctuary on a means to control her cravings. I think her stronger relationship with Roland helps.

* * *

NAME: Mordecai

AGE: 44

NOTES: I didn't even think 'Mordecai' was a real name. I had to look it up on the ECHOnet to find that it comes _from the Bible!_ No, I'm not kidding(2). It's a Jewish name, though he speaks more like a Truxican or a Hispanic.

Colour-blind(3), half-cut(4) most of the time…and yet, he is one of the best snipers out there. I should know. The bastard shot at me for fun, deliberately missing, because Lilith wanted to put the fear of God into me. I wasn't exactly happy with that, understandably.

I can't exactly call myself a friend of Mordecai(5). Not because he is as arrogant as Axton, for example, and he's not stupid. I personally think he has an attitude problem (he's very apathetic in most regards), and his distrust of Hyperion hasn't gone away that much. True, the others don't trust Hyperion that much, but Mordecai (along with Brick) would probably want to keep fighting.

I think part of the reason was the fiasco with Bloodwing. Jack's people captured her (Bloodwing's species can change genders, apparently), and experimented on her. And don't get me wrong, Bloodwing and Mordecai didn't deserve that. I can't blame him for still feeling rancour at Hyperion for Bloodwing being mutated…and then murdered by Jack. I think the only reason he didn't go out immediately on a campaign for revenge, or else drink himself into a possibly lethal coma, was that we found an egg Bloodwing left behind. Already, he's training the new Bloodwing, calling it Talon.

That being said, I have to admit, he's a good teacher. After that whole BS at Oasis, I had him train Angel and myself in sniper rifles. He found it hard to forgive Angel(6), given that whole New Haven massacre, but he swallowed his pride and helped teach us.

* * *

NAME: Brick

AGE: 41

NOTES: If Salvador is like how I thought the stereotypical Vault Hunter was like in the second generation of Vault Hunters, then Brick is the stereotype in the first generation. Tall, musclebound, scarred, and revelling in violence. The best thing that you can say about Brick is that, while he has few friends, he is intensely loyal to them to the very end. But I don't really like him, and the feeling is mutual.

After the fall of New Haven, Brick fell out with the other Vault Hunters after murdering the traitor who had sold them out to Hyperion. He became listless and wandered Pandora as a mercenary, only to be captured by Handsome Jack's lackey, Nisha Kadam, the Sheriff of Lynchwood. Kadam tortured him for a long time, but despite being an expert in torture, Kadam didn't break Brick…until she found the puppy Brick had as a pet. She snapped its neck, which brought Brick to the very height of rage. If Hyperion was going to treat him as a bandit, he declared, he intended to make sure they feared him. So, he founded a new bandit gang, the Slabs, and became their leader, the Slab King. They made their base of operations in Thousand Cuts, near a top Hyperion facility that Brick intended to breach one day, not knowing that it was Control Core Angel.

If there's one thing that I'm grateful to Brick for, it's that he helped me in my quest to rescue Angel. He had reservations, sure, but that was because I was former Hyperion. My standing with him seemed to improve after I killed Jack and Nisha. I don't think we'll ever be friends, but like with the other Vault Hunters, old and new, he's a good man to watch your back.

 **FILE 5 ANNOTATIONS:**

 **Snyder's thoughts on the first Vault Hunters. Nothing much to add here.**

 **Except for this: just before I published this chapter, I finished the main campaign of** ** _Borderlands_** **, and am now starting on my second DLC campaign (I've done** ** _The Zombie Island of Dr Ned_** **), namely** ** _The Secret Armoury of General Knoxx_** **. I've noticed that it seems to be in the DLC that** ** _Borderlands_** **is getting the tone that it would have in its sequels. I also reckon that Commandant Steele, as a villain, is very much a non-entity, with very little personality or depth. Jack and Zarpedon by comparison (even with what little I have played of the Pre-Sequel) have considerably more personality and depth.** **And General Knoxx's tired, apathetic attitude is hilarious.**

 **1\. I looked up profiles on the Borderlands Wiki. Weird thing was, many of the profiles seemed to suggest locations from** ** _Borderlands 2_** **. I've added five years to the ages displayed on those profiles, hoping that that works for their ages in** ** _Borderlands 2_** **.**

 **2\. I didn't even know this was a real name until I punched it into Wikipedia to see if it was. You learn something new every day. So Snyder is definitely talking with my own voice there.**

 **3\. According to his profile (mentioned above), Mordecai IS colour-blind.**

 **4\. Half-cut, for those of you unfamiliar with British slang, means that someone is drunk.**

 **5\. Ironically, he is my main character for my playthrough of the original** ** _Borderlands_** **.**

 **6\. I took this attitude from a fanfic called** ** _The Sirens Aren't Alright_** **by Civilized Lee. I could understand Tina's attitude to Angel in the fic, but Mordecai?**


	8. File 6: Snyder on Sanctuary

**FILE 6:**

 **THE SNYDER FILES FACSIMILES: THOUGHTS ON CITIZENS OF SANCTUARY AND OTHER ASSOCIATES OF THE CRIMSON RAIDERS**

NAME: Moxxi Hodunk, AKA Mad Moxxi

AGE: At least in her forties, given that she has two adult children, Scooter and Ellie. That being said, she looks like she's much younger, even without makeup(1). But she's not telling. What's that saying, a true lady never reveals her age or something?

NOTES: Easily one of the most lusted-after women on Pandora, Mad Moxxi is famous for having at least four former husbands (I can name two offhand: Marcus Kincaid and Handsome Jack), lovers of both genders that number in the dozens at least, and a taste for violence that had her, at one point, heading up the Underdome, once Pandora's premium arena for carnage and violence. At least until Jack blew it up. Jack often called her 'Old Balloon Tits', an apt if somewhat derogatory name, given how buxom she is. And yet, to focus on her breasts, her beauty and her bloodthirstiness is to rather miss the true Moxxi that lies beneath.

I first met her when she was married to Jack (which was before he became President, though he had some surprising authority). Even at that age, I was still pining for Angel. Moxxi flirted with me, but when she realised I was holding out for another woman (as well as Jack's intolerance for Moxxi playing around), she toned it down. Still has the sultry seductress thing going, true, but she also adopted a more maternal air about her. Of course, my own mother wouldn't be seen dead in Mad Moxxi's standard outfit, of a sort of fetishized version of the Mad Hatter's outfit (though back when she ran the Underdome, it also had a bit of the Red Queen to it too). But one forgets that she is a mother at least twice over. Not only that, but she fled the Hodunks, a Pandora clan of inbred Southern-style stereotypical rednecks, after they intended to turn her daughter Ellie into a brood mare. All three of them have harboured rancour for the Hodunks ever since, and as of writing, Ellie, with the help of Salvador and Mordecai, has started a gang war between the Hodunks and the Zafords, and probably making Pandora a better place in the process.

Moxxi also has owned a number of less-than-reputable but still popular bars, including the Red Light near T-Bone Junction, the Up Over Bar in Concordia on Elpis, and Moxxxi's at Sanctuary. It was at that last that I met the first friendly face in Sanctuary. Of all the inhabitants of Sanctuary, Moxxi is the closest I have to a confidant. Angel too. The three of us (plus Tim, who I'll get to later) have all experienced what it was liked to get screwed over by Jack, though Moxxi experienced it a little too literally. Not only that, but despite her sexualised appearance and her former ownership of the Underdome, she is actually quite an intelligent and compassionate woman. Many people want to bed her, but I am more content to call her a friend.

* * *

NAME: Scooter Hodunk

AGE: Not sure. I'm guessing mid to late 20s.

NOTES: As much as I like Moxxi, I'm not as enamoured with her son, Scooter. Don't get me wrong, the guy's got his heart in the right place for the most part, though he seems a bit too ready to resort to murder at times. He's an absolute genius when it comes to vehicles of all kinds. I'm told all the Hodunks have this, but Scooter in particular is, and I'm quoting Angel here, a savant. His specialty is in cars, but it was also thanks to him that Sanctuary is currently flying. He's also one of the inhabitants of Sanctuary who is willing to overlook the fact that Angel and I worked for Hyperion.

But, well, he's one of those people who (outside of his realm of expertise) is a few stubbies short of a six-pack(2), as my dad used to say. Given his heritage, I'd say a few chromosomes short of a karytotype(3). He's crude, clueless on how interpersonal relationships work, and is murderously protective of his mother and her girly parts (his words, not mine). I heard he put one of her lovers, Lucky Zaford, into a shallow grave. Alive. And to be honest, the way he brays "CATCH-A-RIIIIDE!" from his pre-recorded messages on the Catch-A-Ride stations grates on me. And I heard that more than a few women he had his eye on had either fled Sanctuary, or committed suicide rather than be with him. Not because he is actually malevolent or nasty. But he seems to think that romance would invariably include porn mags. Ugh.

* * *

NAME: Doctor Patricia Tannis

AGE: Not sure. Maybe early 30s?

NOTES: Neurotic. Insufferable. Insane. You can use these words and many more like them to describe Patricia Tannis. But she is also a genius. And for all my own intelligence, I am no genius. I'll have to grant Tannis that much, she is a genius. I'm pretty sure that she has multiple doctorates in ridiculously varying areas, including medicine (which pisses off Dr Zed(4)), archaeology, xenobiology, engineering, and physics(5). She is one of those rare scientists who is ridiculously omnidisciplinary. My own doctorate was in Environmental Toxicology (specifically the effects of Eridium on animals _in vivo_ ), and while I was young to get a doctorate, I am still nowhere near Tannis' level.

Maybe that's a good thing, all things considered. While I cannot talk much about insanity, being prey to the Sci-Zone, Tannis is insane, or at least extremely neurotic, all the time. She has been diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, but I know she has a lot more wrong with her than that. To be fair, she went through a lot on Pandora. Brought to the planet by the Dahl Corporation to investigate the Eridian ruins, she began to develop worse neuroses than she ever had before, especially as her colleagues were killed either by bandits, or by the wildlife of Pandora. And judging by what I have learned about the opening of the original Vault, after Dahl pulled her funding and pulled out of Pandora, Atlas stepped in, the Crimson Lance covertly supplying and supporting her. Atlas had, after all, found the very first of the Vaults on Promethea, a cache of weapons and technology. They thought that if someone could find the Vault, it was Tannis.

How willing Tannis was to work with Atlas, I don't know. I know she didn't like their top officer on Pandora, Commandant Steele. In fact, she asked me for the autopsy reports once. But she did conceal her involvement with Atlas from the original Vault Hunters, though she was betrayed by Atlas when they instituted a hostile takeover of the planet, and locked her up after making her send the Vault Hunters on a wild goose chase for another part of the Vault Key. They forgave her, and gave her the then-inert Vault Key for safe-keeping. However, later, Jack and Wilhelm tortured her into giving up the Vault Key. According to her, though, she only gave it up after one of her ceiling chairs was destroyed. I have no idea what she meant by that. She was invited by Roland to join Sanctuary, which she did.

I respect Tannis as being way smarter than I am, and without her Siren powers projector, I would never have saved Angel. All the same, she disturbs me. After that saga with the Wildlife Exploitation Preserve, I returned ECHO logs that detailed Dr Samuels' experiments on human beings to her. She seemed all too enthusiastic to listen to them, and I lost my temper, yelling at her for treating them as if they were things to be savoured for pleasure, and pointing out that Tiny Tina was one of the victims of those experiments, as was (in a roundabout way) my own mentor(6). Tannis had the decency to look a little shame-faced at it, but even so, I am disturbed by her. Still, we work well enough as colleagues, especially where Sirens and Eridium is concerned…

* * *

NAME: Doctor Zed.

AGE: Probably 50s or 60s.

NOTES: He doesn't have a medical licence. He has a rather blasé attitude to experimentation in dubious areas (though his brother is apparently even worse). And he's a profiteer in that he heads up a franchise of vending machines that dispense medicine and shields. And yet, this does not detract from the fact that, when push comes to shove, Zed cares about helping people. Well, as long as they're friends or people who can pay.

Zed was living in Fyrestone by the time the first Vault Hunters came across him, and he was the only human inhabitant of the small town at the time (with a Claptrap unit for company, and TK Baha living outside the town's confines). He's pretty tough, though, more than capable of fighting off bandits when necessary. He moved to New Haven temporarily during the whole Atlas fiasco, but moved back to Fyrestone, his birthplace.

Everyone in Sanctuary has at least one reason to be thankful to Zed. I have two. Firstly, he helped patch me up (by proxy) after I was attacked by a mob. And secondly, without the life-support tank and medical injector he modified, I would not have been able to get Angel out of her prison. Dubious he may be, but a good man, for the most part, he is.

* * *

NAME: Marcus Kincaid

AGE: Probably 50s or 60s.

NOTES: Moxxi's third husband, and the only ex-husband she is on good terms with. Marcus Kincaid is a cheerfully amoral man with the girth and jolly façade of Santa Claus, the amoral business acumen of Del Boy(7), and the tightfistedness of Ebenezer Scrooge. Although he is mostly known as a weapons dealer with weapons and ammo-dispensing machines all around Pandora and Elpis, he has also worked in other realms. He drove the bus from the spaceport to Fyrestone for the original Vault Hunters, and he enjoys telling stories, albeit with his slant on them.

I'm on good terms with Marcus, partly because I got him a new type of grenade: a shield grenade. A shame it led to the death of its designer, Dave Jones, a friend of mine. Marcus allows me and Angel to use his firing range (for a fee): unlike the other Vault Hunters, we're less adept at using weapons. Of course, don't try getting refunds on a gun: you can sell it back for part of the price, but Marcus' motto is 'No Refunds'.

* * *

NAME: Sir Alastair Hammerlock

AGE: Over 40. Not sure how old he is exactly.

NOTES: One of the first good events to come out of my accompanying the Vault Hunters was a chance to meet a man who I greatly respected and looked up to. And unlike many cases of meeting one's heroes, Sir Alastair Hammerlock didn't disappoint. Despite dressing up not unlike those stereotypes of the Great White Hunter, like some Allan Quartermain of Pandora(8), Hammerlock was actually a compassionate and intelligent man. True, he does sometimes ask to have the local population of Bullymongs thinned out, or experiments done on Varkids, but given that the former are mean SOBs, and the latter he took responsibility for, I can forgive him for that.

Originally from the planet Hermes, his older sister Lady Aurelia inherited the family fortune, and apparently strove to make his life miserable. While he enjoys hunting, he combines that with zoology, whereas Aurelia does it purely for the thrill, from what Hammerlock told me. Be that as it may, he spent much of his adult life studying Pandora's wildlife, getting his limbs ripped off by a thresher he dubbed Old Slappy. He is currently a cyborg, though unlike Wilhelm, he isn't a fucking lunatic. Indeed, he's a pretty nice guy, and one of the leading authorities on the zoology of Pandora. Most of what I know about Bullymongs and Skags and Rakks, I learned either from one of his books, or from the man himself.

We first met him at Liar's Berg, where he had become stranded after Flynt's men attacked while he was studying Bullymongs. After we dealt with Captain Flynt and his crew, Hammerlock followed us to Sanctuary. He was also one of those who came to Oasis to help us, and Hammerlock was my best man at both of my weddings (the one interrupted by Jack, and the one that was actually completed). Before the first one, he actually called me a friend. I was touched to be told by a man I respected that he considered me a friend.

Unfortunately, the poor guy has been rather unlucky in love. If he wasn't gay, Gaige (who has a major crush on him, although she is able to rein it in) would probably be on him like a Skag on carrion, even though he's old enough to be her father, if not her grandfather. And his last boyfriend was a brute and an idiot playing at being a zoologist who liked to punch wildlife to death. Good men are hard enough to find on Pandora, and I think poor Hammerlock will be looking for a long time. All the best of luck to him, though.

* * *

NAME: Claptrap

AGE: I'd have to look up how old the product line is. He'd probably lie if I asked him.

NOTES: One of Jack's few good deeds was, in my opinion, the destruction of Hyperion's CL4P-TP steward robot line, AKA the Claptraps. Even before the infamous rebellion that occurred five years back, they tended to be obnoxious, loud, egotistical, obsessed with dubstep and dancing, and basically being a Dalek that was merely irritating rather than genocidal. So it was an unpleasant surprise when one found me and the Vault Hunters after the train blew up. He promptly recruited us as his minions to fight Handsome Jack, as revenge for Jack destroying his product line.

After some conversations with Angel and Tim, though, I actually asked Claptrap about part of his past: namely, as a Vault Hunter. I got more of the truth out of Tim than I did out of Claptrap, but even so, Claptrap does have some good achievements to his name. Helping stop Zarpedon destroy Elpis and Pandora does count, even if he was programmed as a Vault Hunter by Jack. And Tim did agree that at times, Claptrap did manage some pretty badass things. And without his help, we wouldn't have been able to get into Control Core Angel. But he's still an egotistical dingus of a robot.

* * *

NAME: Tiny Tina

AGE: 13

NOTES: In order to test my character, Lilith sent me to Tundra Express to babysit Tina. If Tina liked me, I passed the test. If I did anything, Tina probably would have killed me, over a prolonged period. Thankfully, the former occurred.

This was in spite of her past. Her family emigrated to Pandora not long before Jack took over Hyperion. When Jack wanted test subjects for Slag experimentation, a bandit called Flesh-Stick, who had helped Tina's parents before, sold them out. But Tina's parents gave her a grenade to make sure she escaped. I know this because I came across ECHO recording by my mentor, Doctor Samuels, who was forced by Jack to do these experiments because her wife was kept hostage. I also believe that Krieg may have been her father, though I don't know for sure. Thankfully, she didn't hold my mentor, or my area of expertise, against me.

I don't know how she and Roland met, only that they did. Roland saved Tina's life more than a few times, but if he is to be believed (and I _do_ believe him), she saved him a whole lot more. Not for nothing that I call her the world's deadliest 13-year old.

Tina is a mixture of contradictions. She adores many childish things, like tea parties, stuffed toys, and chocolate-chip cookies. She also uses language at times that you'd expect from someone twice her age (like pimp or badonkadonk), loves high explosives and bloody violence, and tortured a man to death with electric shocks (admittedly, he was the aforementioned Flesh-Stick, and thus highly deserving of said treatment). When we first met, she was singing her own version of 'Pop Goes the Weasel' as she blew up a Psycho she had tied up. She has violent mood swings. She's seriously fucked up in the head, but you still want to give her a hug anyway.

I think she likes me partly because I share at least one like with her (namely tea, and not Pandoran tea), and partly because she thinks the Sci-Zone is awesome. The fact that I helped get Flesh-Stick for her, and did so in style, only served to cement that fact. Like Gaige, Tina is like a little sister I never had, a bond that only strengthened during our unintended trip to Oasis, where she proved her mettle in battle. She likes Angel, too, despite the fact that Angel is the daughter of Jack, not to mention partly responsible for the New Haven massacre(9). In fact, she seems to want us to be together. She's also bonded with Moxxi and Tim, despite the latter looking like Jack: I guess it's because Tim made a good impression on Tina by parodying Jack mercilessly when they first met. It's like Moxxi and Tim are her new parents.

One last note: she loves _Bunkers and Badasses_ , apparently having been taught the game by Roland. She's very imaginative, though her Game Master skills do need honing. Then again, so do my skills as a player.

* * *

NAME: Steve

AGE: Hell if I know

NOTES: I first met this rather cheerful bandit and associate of both the Crimson Raiders and the Zafords when Lilith and Tannis were testing Tannis' device. His sole vocabulary seemed to consist of the word 'Heyo!', with varying volume and cadence. He was also a friend of Claptrap's. I honestly don't know much more, other than that he worked as an enforcer for the Zafords.

He was also one of those sent to Oasis to help us. And it cost him his life. Annoying as he was, he was much better than Claptrap. And he didn't deserve to die the way he did.

 **FILE 6 ANNOTATIONS:**

 **I'm pretty sure I got everyone who was in Sanctuary. If you're wondering why Tim or Angel weren't present, they'll be in the next chapter, about Hyperion employees and the like. Incidentally, this is the longest chapter yet in my fanfics. :P**

 **1\. I was amazed at how great Moxxi looks without makeup in the Pre-Sequel. I'd frankly prefer her like that. As for how Snyder knows, I think Snyder (and Angel) did the same thing as the Vault Hunters in the Pre-Sequel: stumbled upon her in her down-time (before she left with Tim to investigate the Badass Crater of Badassitude for Tannis, anyway). Unlike the other Vault Hunters, Moxxi is more comfortable being out of character around them, so while she would ask them to be quiet, she doesn't use the threat of a shallow grave.**

 **2\. An Aussie idiom. A stubby is a name for a beer bottle. The equivalent can be 'a few sandwiches short of a picnic'.**

 **3\. I used this metaphor back in** ** _Hooked on a Feeling_** **. A karyotype is the full set of chromosomes in a cell. Angel even says in the game that he's short a few chromosomes.**

 **4\. This is discussed in the game. Zed seems a bit bitter that Tannis has a medical degree, though his wording suggests that Tannis lords it over him.**

 **5\. I chose these disciplines to show how Tannis is capable of working on Eridian ruins, having all but created the ECHO network (on Pandora, at least), and so on.**

 **6\. I wanted to do this in** ** _Hooked on a Feeling_** **, but didn't get a chance to write in the relevant scene. Her cavalier attitude to these ECHOs in-game pissed me off. Snyder, outside the Sci-Zone, would agree.**

 **7\. Del Boy being the character played famously by David Jason in** ** _Only Fools and Horses_** **, a long-running BBC comedy series. Until** ** _A Touch of Frost_** **, it was easily his most famous role.**

 **8\. Allan Quartermain may be best known to modern readers from Alan Moore's** ** _The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen_** **and the movie adaptation, but he was a well-established literary character created by H Rider Haggard for** ** _King Solomon's Mines_** **, as well as later books.**

 **9\. In contrast to her attitude in the game. I know Roland died in Control Core Angel, but I think Tina was more than a little bitchy in turning Angel into a drider and a villain. I don't care how much of a child she was, or how much denial she was drowning in regarding Roland's death. Here, Tina at least knows that Angel was coerced, and given that she likes Snyder, she likes Angel.**


	9. File 7: Snyder on Hyperion

**FILE 7:**

 **THE SNYDER FILES FACSIMILES: THOUGHTS ON THE EMPLOYEES OF HYPERION**

NAME: John 'Handsome Jack' Clarke

AGE: I'm not sure, but 40s or 50s, probably.

NOTES: The man who became the most hated figure on Pandora started out as an honorary uncle for me. You know, the sort who was cheerful and told off-colour jokes. A guy who was fun to be around. He was just a programmer, although despite Tassiter's demeaning him, he did grow in responsibility long before the Elpis saga.

And yet, something must've been there, something (greed? Avarice?) that drove him to imprison Angel and make her effectively the lynchpin for Hyperion's computer network. Something that drove him to murder, by proxy, his own wife (the first one, anyway). Handsome Jack was born long before Lilith punched the Vault logo onto his face.

My dealings with the man were fairly good before then, though. True, he struck me down when I found Angel was missing, and told me never to talk to him about her again, but at the time, I thought he was grieving for her death, as well as that of his wife. And it was he who guided me into working for Hyperion, even as I completed my education. Given how he treated me later, I wonder, what he really wanted from me?

Anyway, Jack was dissatisfied with his station. He wanted to make his way to the top. And he heard the rumours of a Vault on Pandora, which he began investigating, using his spare time and contacts on Pandora. He managed to somehow confirm that not only was the Vault real, but what it contained: the Destroyer, as well as a cache of Eridium, something Tannis never managed to do. And given that the Vault was apparently due to open, he had Angel manipulate the original Vault Hunters to help him open it, as well as stymie Atlas.

I knew nothing of this, of course. I heard of the Vault incident, about the four Vault Hunters who became infamous, of the fall of Atlas…but I was busy at university. My parents were on Elpis during that whole saga, too.

Even though the Destroyer was vanquished, and Hyperion got its hands on the Eridium within the Vault, Jack's position only rose relatively slowly. What he did during the Claptrap Revolution, I have no idea. I know something about what happened with Elpis and Helios, thanks to Tim, Lilith, and Roland. While Jack did some reprehensible things during that saga, I think the catalyst that made Jack fall hardest was Lilith punching him with a Phasewalk attack, while he was bonded to an Eridian artifact. He got scarred physically and mentally, his psychoses that may have always been there now at full throttle. I certainly know that he got worse after he began wearing the mask and started calling himself 'Handsome Jack'.

To give you an idea of how psychotic he was, the reason I even met the second lot of Vault Hunters in the first place was that he somehow found an ECHO message I had received from Angel. At the time, I had thought that Angel was dead, or perhaps in a coma. When Jack found out, he deliberately sent me to die. Did he do it to kill me, or to hurt Angel for her defiance? Knowing Jack, it was probably both. The twisted bastard claimed to love his child, but truth be told, what he felt was an extreme possessiveness, a need for Angel to be under his control.

I'm not sure I want to go over every little detail of what happened. He interrupted my first wedding to Angel, he murdered Krieg and Steve, he had Angel dancing to his tune like a cruel puppeteer. And he had the gall to believe that he was the hero.

I'm glad he's dead. The universe is a much better place for it.

* * *

NAME: Angel Clarke

AGE: 24

NOTES: When I was six years old, I was taken to a special clinic on Elpis where I was diagnosed as having the Sci-Zone. There, I met a girl my age with what I thought were blue tattoos. She was a Siren, her name was Angel, and no truer appellation was ever given to a girl.

We had a friendship that continued for two years, until unbeknownst to me, Jack locked her away in Control Core Angel. He never said anything about her, and forbade me to ask about her. At the time, I thought she had died, and he was grieving, especially as his wife died in an accident involving a Loader.

I still had this vague, possibly vain hope that she was alive. I think Jack's behaviour, at times, made me realise that he wasn't a man in mourning. Perhaps she had just gone away, or else was comatose. It was one of the reasons I refused Moxxi's advances when she was Jack's second wife.

Angel did some of her work for Jack willingly or reluctantly, but most of the time, she was forced to by a special collar that induced extreme nociception until she complied. That's a fancy term for saying that it caused her a lot of pain until she did what Jack told her to. I wouldn't be surprised if Jack used one on Nisha in the bedroom: she was something of a sadomasochist.

Through Angel hacking into their ECHO devices, she helped direct them (on Jack's orders) along the task of opening the Vault of the Destroyer. She was hampered for a time when Commandant Steele shut down the ECHO network on Pandora (she could transmit to them, but couldn't tell where they were), and told me that she was actually overjoyed when they brought it back up, and she could tell they were safe.

But they refused to listen to her after that whole thing with the Destroyer. And after she helped (unwillingly, unbeknownst to the first Vault Hunters) with the destruction of New Haven, they considered her to be one of Jack's pet monsters, along with Wilhelm and Nisha. They also thought that she was an AI.

It was around that time that Jack got a hold of the Vault Key. Jack had found out that the Key needed to be charged with Eridium in order to work. Normally, it would take two centuries with background Eridium, but Jack found that the time could be cut down to a couple of years by using Angel as a catalyst, as a living transformer. You know how transformers increase or decrease voltage in an electrical system? A Siren with her blood flooded with Eridium effectively concentrates the Eridium. It is a painful process, Angel assures me, and it means that the Siren who undergoes this process for long enough ends up having her biological processes entirely turned over to using energy from Eridium.

The upshot is that, instead of needing food or oxygen, the Siren only needs the latent power of Eridium. Unfortunately, they also need a near-constant supply, lest they die within seconds of the feeds being removed. Angel knew this, and so, began sowing the seeds for her own demise.

She hadn't intended for me to get caught up with the Vault Hunters. But what she had intended was to die, and so, she sent me a final ECHO message:

 _Ricky,_

 _It's me, Angel. It's been a long time, hasn't it? Listen, I won't be able to say much. I'm sorry I haven't talked to you, but I've been in a bad way for a long time. And Dad won't like me talking to you. Don't say anything to anyone about me. It could end badly. And delete this message ASAP. But know this, Ricky: I treasured the times we spent together. I know how hard it has been, how you've pined for me. Stay strong. I believe in you._

 _Angel_

Jack found the message, as I left it on my ECHO device for longer than Angel would have liked. And, well, I was thrown into that series of near-death experiences and such that you could call an adventure. Loosely.

Angel was planning on using the Vault Hunters, old and new, to kill her and bring down her father, once she was able to break free of his control. Had it not been for my presence, along with so many other factors (Tannis' device, Lilith figuring out from my slip-ups that Angel was a Siren, Zed's auto-injector), she may have died, committing suicide-by-proxy. As it is, well, she's alive. She thought I had gone so far as to cage her like her father, but I never wanted that.

The worst I did was give her a leash: a portable auto-injector (that Dr Zed modified) that continually injects the minimum amount of Eridium needed to keep her alive and comfortable. And even now, that's not needed. After the whole Oasis fiasco, Zed, Tannis, and myself managed to come up with a means of Angel's body continually creating the Eridium it needed. It was surprisingly easy, though the operation on Angel was somewhat painful. She's had to go through so much.

She's pretty awesome, though. Besides having pain tolerance many would envy, she has control over electricity at the subatomic level. With subtle, instinctive control, she can effectively hack computer systems and electronics, what she calls 'Phase-shift'. With less finesse and more power, however, she can shoot thunderbolts and lightning, like Zeus if he was a young woman and sexy.

For a time, during the Oasis fiasco, I wondered whether I truly loved her, or whether it was just a childish infatuation that had merely turned into possessiveness. Nisha also brought up one of my worst fears: that somehow, in the Sci-Zone, I'd vivisect Angel. Thankfully, that particular fear hasn't come to pass, but even so, I wonder how long my happiness with Angel will last?

( _Angel's handwriting_ )

Ricky, you proved me wrong. I thought it would last until the day I thought I would die. You tore open that cage and set me free. Out of every person in the universe, you gave me the greatest gift of all: my freedom. I once said to the first Vault Hunters as they fought the Destroyer that I could see up and down the timeline. That wasn't strictly speaking true, though I did do probability analysis(1). But despite my seeing so many outcomes, I never saw what you did.

By the way, there's something you failed to mention. One of the little things I've enjoyed since being free from Dad is swearing. He used to punish me for that. It's a little thing, and I don't want to curse that often, but even so…fuck. Fuck fuck fuck! :)

( _Snyder's handwriting_ )

LOL, as they say in the vernacular. I don't mind you peeking in here. Wish Zer0 wouldn't.

* * *

NAME: Wilhelm

AGE: I think he was in his 50s during the Elpis fiasco.

NOTES: You know that old fictional cliché of cybernetics eating your soul? Having known three cyborgs (four, if you count a few implants Angel has), I can say that it's mostly bollocks. I think it depends on why you get the cybernetics. Gaige got her new arm partly so that she could summon Deathtrap more easily, though it's scary how a teenaged girl would rather do that than go to hospital after gashing her arm deeply. Sir Hammerlock got his after being mauled by Pandoran wildlife, and he does look distinguished despite them.

But Wilhelm? Well, you know that quote by Dr Samuel Johnson? _He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man_ , or something like that. Oh, it started out as a means to cure a case of Bone Waste he had, but he began to have an addiction to cybernetics, simply because he thought the quality of humanity was weak.

He worked for quite a time as an Enforcer, a term given to an elite kind of mercenary. He was hired by Jack as a Vault Hunter shortly before Dahl's Lost Legion attacked. In the aftermath of that whole Elpis thing, Wilhelm was hired by Jack full-time as his personal enforcer. Wilhelm was one of the main forces of the New Haven massacre, and was rightly feared by the first Vault Hunters.

I saw much of his transformation from man into machine myself, as he was the one, after he was retained by Jack, who subdued me when I was in the Sci-Zone. We loathed each other, and I hated him even more as he basically transformed into a human Loader. And, like the first Vault Hunters, I was fucking scared of him, and with good reason.

If there were any redeeming aspects to him, it was that he had a pretty laconic sense of humour. He tended to respond to any statement he didn't like with a very blunt 'No'. His custom surveyor drones, Wolf and Saint, also had humorous voices. And there were times when he made jokes that were actually quite funny.

But he was a monster. A monster betrayed by a more cunning one. Wilhelm was poisoned by Jack, who used an anaesthetic that doesn't mesh well with cyberneural interfaces. Jack wanted us to have a fake power core. Not that it didn't stop Wilhelm from nearly killing me: only Zer0's timely intervention saved me. But the relative ease of killing him set off alarm bells in Zer0's head, as well as mine. A shame we didn't realise the significance of that until it was too late. But it wasn't a shame Wilhelm died. He deserved it. He loved death and destruction, and being a monster.

* * *

NAME: Nisha Kadam

AGE: Late 20s, early 30s.

NOTES: Not all monsters look that way, and not all monsters fix a mask to their face with surgical clamps. Some monsters have the beauty of a goddess…and the malice of a demon.

Nisha Kadam had a rough life. An abusive mother who threw stuff at her, a weak father…and yet, many people in similar situations don't grow up like Nisha. A turning point in her life was when a puppy she had was bitten by a frenzyclutch, and then bit her in a rabid rage. She then believed that love was overrated, that the things you love could either turn against you, or be turned against you.

She began life as somewhere between bounty hunter and bandit. She could have been a hero of sorts, had she not a rather unfortunate tendency to torture people and enjoy it. I know this sounds hypocritical, coming from someone who enjoyed watching Flesh-Stick die during that tea party, but I try not to make it a habit of enjoying torture. Nisha, however, according to Tim, was a sadomasochist of the highest order, deriving sexual pleasure from killing.

I met her a few times after the Elpis fiasco. She had been hired by Jack to be one of his Vault Hunters, and she intended to stay with him as his lover and lackey. Beautiful woman, utterly beautiful, but nasty. She even flirted with me, albeit in a way that made me fear for the safety of my genitals.

Jack made her the Sheriff of Lynchwood, a town that produced Eridium. She almost immediately made many a crime a capital one (she likes seeing people choke to death), and deputised a man by the name of Winger at gunpoint. She tortured Brick for hours on end, before snapping his puppy's neck. She had wanted to piss him off, and succeeded. Funnily enough, she also wanted crime to happen in Lynchwood, if only because she could do what she wanted to the perpetrators.

Jack often visited her for, well, I believe the colloquial term is a booty call. It was during one of those, when we were stranded in Oasis, that we got Tim to try and sow discord in Hyperion by pretending to be Jack, and claim that the real Jack was a treacherous body double. Nisha very nearly killed Jack until he convinced her he was the real deal. Nisha, Jack, and Nakayama then ambushed my wedding with the assistance of Scarlet, an old friend of Nisha's, though Nisha turned on her friend swiftly enough. We managed to capture Nisha, and we held her in custody until we captured Jack. I was the one who killed her. And I'm not sure what further to say on the matter.

* * *

NAME: Timothy Lawrence

AGE: 24 (I know this because I went to one of his birthdays at university)

NOTES: I can barely remember Tim's old face. While I managed to get a part-time job to pay my student fees, Tim got something a little worse.

I first met Tim as a roommate at university. We had fairly divergent degrees, me doing the sciences, and him doing acting, but we enjoyed games, along with my other university acquaintance, Dave Jones. We became fairly good friends, but we went our separate ways after we got our respective Bachelor's Degrees.

The next time I met him, he got hired by Jack to become a body double. Why a relatively low-level programmer needed a body double, few people knew, but Jack was on the verge of making his mark on Pandora. It was after the Elpis fiasco, and Tim and I met afterwards, and caught up. It seemed that Tim had gotten mixed up with the Lost Legion's invasion, and had actually fought alongside Jack's other mercenaries. He didn't tell me much at the time, though I was surprised at how he now looked like Jack, not to mention he sounded like him. I hate to say it, but looking and sounding like Jack was a vast improvement for the poor guy. And at least he doesn't act like him.

I had mentioned Tim to the others a bit before we met Wilhelm. Zer0 and Maya, thankfully, remembered when they came across him and another body double in Opportunity. Tim willingly defected to the Crimson Raiders, and was surprisingly welcomed more readily than I had been. I guess it's because, despite looking like Jack, his character was nothing like that bastard.

Tim not only got along best with Moxxi, whom he had met on Elpis, but Tiny Tina, of all people. I think despite her hatred of Jack, she not only recognised that Tim was a different person, but a _very_ different person, frankly a bit of a dork. And he proved his worth in battle more than once. Not to mention giving the performance of his life when imitating Jack, and making out the real Jack was an impostor. Jack thinks himself a hero, but Tim is the hero Jack should be.

* * *

NAME: Professor Ian Nakayama(2)

AGE: In his 50s, I think.

NOTES: In the department where I worked, Nakayama was one of those who was a major Handsome Jack fanboy. He was also quite a competent scientist, though the man himself was somewhat clumsy and absent-minded. His biggest claim to fame was poisoning the CEO of Atlas not long after the fall of the Crimson Lance(3).

I fell afoul with him when I disputed one of his experimental results. He shoved me. I fell down, literally, and figuratively, into the Sci-Zone. My resulting rampage led him to transferring away from me. I all but forgot him, until a bit of musing in Oasis led me to remember him. I met him again not long after, assisting Jack and Nisha. Although Jack seemed to promise to allow Nakayama to research Angel, I personally reckon that Jack viewed him as an ultimately disposable pawn. After all, Jack suspected sabotage with the anti-respawn gun, and so gave it to Nakayama. Angel let him escape. He wasn't, to our knowledge, in the worst of Hyperion, and Blake would deal with him anyway.

Whatever he's doing now, hopefully it will be of benefit to humanity.

* * *

NAME: Doctor Heather Samuels

AGE: Late 30s.

NOTES: If there's one person who taught me most about Eridium and its effects on living beings, it was Doctor Samuels. Though not my PhD supervisor, she did supervise my Masters' Thesis, and suggested avenues for my PhD. I respected her immensely, and had dismissed as foul rumour that she had been involved with human experimentation at the Wildlife Exploitation Preserve, even after she disappeared.

However, I learned during an expedition to that place that those rumours were true. She did experiment on people using Eridium and Slag. I'm a little heartened to learn that she did so under the worst duress: Jack held her wife hostage, and said that Doctor Samuels would either experiment, or would never see her wife again.

Samuels disappeared during a particularly catastrophic experiment, one that involved the parents of Tiny Tina, as well as the girl herself. That being said, I later asked Angel to find any records of her death, only to find that Doctor Samuels and her spouse were listed as missing, rather than dead. Flesh-Stick had also been listed as missing, presumed dead, but I know I dealt with that bastard. Who knows? Perhaps one day I might find her.

* * *

NAME: President Jeffrey Blake

AGE: Hard to tell: could be anything from late 30s to 50s.

NOTES: Somewhat condescending, cool, calm, and collected, Blake looks vaguely like the devil. He's even grown a little demonic beard since I last saw him(4). And yet, although he's definitely a corporate scumbag, he's also one who actually honours bargains. He's therefore infinitely preferable to his predecessor, Handsome Jack.

Blake was once in charge of the department of Tourism and Mercenary Relations. Why this is is because the two departments were merged after the head of Tourism was murdered when rumours of cutbacks circulated. Blake is widely considered to have hired an assassin (he's not one for doing dirty work himself), though he denies any involvement. That being said, the original Vault Hunters considered him to be a good help during the Claptrap Rebellion, as Blake hired them to help him stop the robots. The fact that Hyperion actually caused the problem by reprogramming a Claptrap into a character assassin, only to have him foment a rebellion, is often overlooked.

Recognising that the Crimson Raiders needed to have a treaty with Hyperion once Jack was dead, Angel engaged in covert communication with Blake. Although Vice President by this point, Blake was called 'Jimmy' rather than 'Jeffrey' by Jack, deliberately. Blake needed little incentive to begin moving Hyperion away from Jack. But Jack needed to die, or else Blake couldn't follow through with his coup. After I killed Jack and Nisha, Blake negotiated with the Crimson Raiders regarding the Vaults, as well as having Angel and myself work as his representatives to the Crimson Raiders.

Blake's a slimy bugger, but better the devil you know, than the devil with a mask. And that metaphor officially carked out.

 **FILE 7 ANNOTATIONS:**

 **Okay, this will be the last chapter for the 'files' section. Yes, I know I haven't done the characters at Oasis. I'll do them later. But I want to get this 'story' finished, so that I can get to posting the first chapter of** ** _Welcome to the Jungle_** **.**

 **1\. My attempt to explain away Angel's claim to see up and down the timeline in the original** ** _Borderlands_** **.**

 **2\. I gave Nakayama the first name of Ian, after his voice actor, Ian Sinclair.**

 **3\. I decided that this was part of the reason you don't see Atlas in later games: it's partly because of the events of** ** _The Secret Armoury of General Knoxx_** **, and partly because I decided that the CEO dying happened shortly thereafter.**

 **4\. My attempt to explain away a continuity error: the images I saw online and in videos made it hard to tell whether Blake had facial hair in his appearance in the original Borderlands. Upon playing the relevant DLC, I realised he didn't have facial hair! I decided to make out like he had grown a small, demonic beard in the five years between the events of** ** _Borderlands_** **and** ** _Borderlands 2_** **.**


	10. Coda: Missions Accepted

**CODA:**

 **MISSIONS ACCEPTED**

"I see," Athena said, peering at the files in her hand. "So, I will probably be babysitting two Hyperion assets, as well as Vault Hunters, a couple of whom may not be very pleased to see me?"

"That is a somewhat pessimistic way of looking at it," Blake said, adjusting his tie. "You have decided to accept, of course?"

Athena frowned. She nodded, though. The remuneration was quite…she decided not to call it handsome in her head. And there was another thing. "I've been meaning to catch up with the original Vault Hunters for a while, only, I wasn't sure what they thought of me, when I worked with Jack. Janey may take some convincing, though."

"Which is why I took the liberty of arranging for a mechanic's station in the Crater that Miss Springs can work at," Blake purred. "It's practically next door to Mad Moxxi's establishment in the Crater, though apparently she has gone missing. By the way, you'll need to take these in your Storage Deck."

Athena frowned, looking at the items Blake was proffering. Blood bags. "Why?"

"The Vault at the Crater will only open when the blood of the ultimate coward is spilled, or so Tannis claims. Snyder suggested, albeit without much hope for a result, that either his blood, or Jack's, may suffice."

Athena took the blood bags with a sigh. It looked like this was going to be a long job…

* * *

The climate was too damned hot and humid, the woman reflected as she walked along the corridors of the ruined and wrecked ship, following the hunched-over, wiry man. Still, Aegrus was at least not that boring, what with the savages, the Drifters, the Boroks, and all sorts of beasties.

The woman was of an indeterminate age, at least in her forties if not her fifties. She had a regal, haughty air, a tanned, imperious and aquiline face framed by black hair styled into an immaculate style. A single stripe of white adorned her hair, giving her the vague air of an aristocratic skunk. Her clothing was blue, and seemed to be a hybrid of high society dress and a battle uniform. A choker with a pale-blue diamond on it adorned her neck, and gloves adorned with similarly-coloured jewels were on her elegant hands. A very large, and very expensive rifle, Jakobs manufacture, was strapped to her back.

"It's good that you came, Lady Hammerlock," the wiry man said. "How has life been treating you?"

"By burying me under fetid heaps of ennui," the woman responded in a posh tone.

 **LADY AURELIA HAMMERLOCK AS**

 **THE HUNTRESS**

 **Vault Hunter. Ice Queen. Evil Bitch.**

"Well, hopefully this might bring you out of it," the man said good-naturedly.

"Professor Nakayama, you _do_ realise _who_ you are talking to? It takes quite a bit to interest me. What is it that you think could bring me out of my boredom?"

Nakayama grimaced as he waded through a puddle. "Let's just say that my employer wants you to help make some people's lives a living hell."

 **PROFESSOR NAKAYAMA AS**

 **THE WOULD-BE MAD SCIENTIST**

 **Lacks Dignity, Common Sense, and Bravery.**

"Hmm…may be interesting. But who is your employer? I mean, now that Jack is dead…"

"Oh, you'll see," Nakayama said, with a grin that actually made him look slightly scary. A remarkable achievement on the ratty little man, Lady Hammerlock noted. Even with those Eridium crystals apparently growing out of him like purple acne, or the cannon mounted on his shoulder (was that Wilhelm's old cannon?), he needed every bit of intimidation he could get.

Lady Hammerlock had been summoned to Pandora some time ago by Nakayama. He said very little, only that his employer needed her help. Said employer also knew that she didn't do things for money (she owned a planet, and her fortune was so immense, it would take a lot to put a serious dent in it), but instead, offered her the chance to hunt the wildlife of Aegrus, as well as to hunt the most dangerous game of all. Not to mention putting the boot into her brother, which was always something guaranteed to get her interested. After all, she hated her brother.

Which was why she deigned to trudge through the ruined Hyperion ship the _HSS Terminus_. Otherwise, it would be tedious and disgusting.

* * *

Through half-flooded chambers and ruined walkways, they finally made their way to a decrepit room, mostly filled with shadows that hid whatever lay within. Lady Hammerlock frowned. "And where is your employer, Nakayama?"

From out of the shadows, a voice rasped, "Right here." Then, a mangled, warped figure shuffled and limped from the shadows.

For the first time in a long time, Lady Hammerlock could truly say that she was shocked and disturbed. For a time, she was speechless, before she recovered her composure, like the aristocrat she was meant to be. "I say…this is most unexpected."

"I thought so too, myself," the figure rasped. "But you're still with me, right, Lady Hammerlock? I can assure you, it's going to be very interesting."

"I can see that," Lady Hammerlock said, a smile gracing her features. "So, when do we start?"

"Very soon," the figure rasped. "Very soon."

 **THE SHADOWY FIGURE AS**

 **THE VILLAIN**

 **Well, That's Fucking Ominous.**

 **CODA ANNOTATIONS:**

 **Nothing much to say here, really, except, keep an eye out for** ** _Welcome to the Jungle_** **.**

 **Lady Hammerlock and Nakayama have teamed up, and someone else is their leader. Who is it? Well, wouldn't you like to know? I'm sure many of you will guess who it is. All will be revealed later in** ** _Welcome to the Jungle_** **, once they get to Aegrus.**

 **This won't be the end of this actual 'story', though. I will be posting more files and even a few omakes later. Watch this space.**


	11. Omake 1: Sharpshooter

**OMAKE 1:**

 **SHARPSHOOTER (C)**

( _Note: When I post either omakes or files from now on, I will be marking them as 'C' for definitely canon to the Ballad of Ricky and Angel, 'PC' for possibly canon, and 'NC' for anything non-canon, but written for fun. I might also include 'AU' for any stories that are alternate tellings of events in Snyder's life_ )

TRANSCRIPT OF ECHO COMMUNICATION BETWEEN LILITH AND MORDECAI

MORDECAI: Wha? Yeah, yeah, I'm up. Who's callin'?

LILITH: Hey, Mordecai.

MORDECAI: Hey, Lilith, long time no see. Well, talk, anyway. What can I do for you?

LILITH: I want you to do me a favour. I've sent a former Hyperion employee to the Tundra Express.

MORDECAI: Ah, and you want me to ice him, right? Or introduce him to Bloodwing?

LILITH: Actually, no. He came with that group of Vault Hunters who've been making waves over the past few days. You know, the ones Jack failed to kill on his death train. We got into a bit of a fight, but he proved trustworthy enough. Well, he saved my life a couple of times. Problem is, he's also got some sort of batshit crazy Jekyll and Hyde thing going.

MORDECAI: Wait, what?

LILITH: It's called the Sci-Zone. I'm looking it up even now. Very rare disorder. Basically turns him into a hammy mad-scientist. Makes him scarily good at combat, though he's a bit of a wimp outside it. Which, incidentally, is the reason I called you. Take potshots at anything that threatens him. Bandits, Varkids, Skags…

MORDECAI: Okay, got the picture. Don't kill the Hyperion _hijo de la puta_. Why did you send him here, then?

LILITH: Tina. I know you need to keep close to your spy systems, and with Roland captured by the Bloodshots…

MORDECAI: Whoa, whoa, wait, what? Roland was captured?!

LILITH: Yes. Don't worry, the other Vault Hunters are on their way to get him. Anyway, Tina's been a while without a visit. I've sent this Hyperion doctor to babysit her.

MORDECAI: …You know it might have been more merciful just to let me blow his brains out, right?

LILITH: Mordecai, listen to me. Tina's a good judge of character, you and I know that. If she likes him, then we're good. If he turns out to be a dick, then Tina will sit him down to one of her tea parties. Frankly, the other Vault Hunters seem to trust him enough. If we're very lucky, we not only get someone who wants to take Jack down, but someone with good intel on Hyperion. Once the Hyperion guy gets to Tina, wait a few hours, then go down there to make sure Tina's all right. He's lightly armed: he's got a Maliwan pistol and a Maliwan SMG, though he also has these weird prototype shield grenades.

MORDECAI: What, like the ones in that old video game?

LILITH: Yeah. I really felt it when I used my energy punch. It bruised my hand. He wasn't expecting anything to get through it, though. Anyway, bring an extra sleeping bag and that new shipment of her tea and crumpets to her.

MORDECAI: Okay. Two questions. One, can I shoot near him, put the fear of God into him?

LILITH: Sure, at least till you know for sure. And the second question?

MORDECAI: If Tina does off him, or else if I have to talk to him, what's his name?

LILITH: Doctor Richard Snyder. I've called ahead to Tina about him, so she's prepared.

MORDECAI: Ah, I see him now. Okay, better go. Bye, Lilith.

 **OMAKE 1 ANNOTATIONS:**

 **Not much to say here, save for that this is the first of a series of omakes or side stories to the Ballad of Ricky and Angel. The canonicity classification system above should be your guide.**


	12. Omake 2: Karma's a Bitch

**OMAKE 2:**

 **KARMA'S A BITCH (C)**

Thousand Cuts was not the sort of area you went to by choice. Normally, anyway. I'd been here precisely once before, when participating in the raid on Control Core Angel. It was rocky and mountainous and bleak, and was infested with bandits in the same way that neglected dogs tended to be infested with ticks and fleas.

And yet, here I was. Angel and I had come back here, more or less voluntarily, as part of a surprise visit. Unfortunately, that meant that we had to fight through the bandits, the Slabs, in order to get to their leader, the Slab King. Thankfully, most of them recognised me from the raid on Control Core Angel, and merely offered snide remarks than violence. Any idiots who put the moves on Angel got a sweet smile, and an electric shock powerful enough to make them shit their pants. She rarely gets the chance to exercise her more overt powers, especially now that her bone marrow was producing the Eridium she needed to stay alive. She ate very little, and usually only for pleasure, or to build up her muscle from the wasted, disused things they had been when she had been imprisoned by her father. The Eridium provided her energy needs.

I pondered this as we made our way to the Slab King's 'palace'. Sirens were human women, born with tattoo-like markings that were merely the visible portion of a vast network of tissue that comprised what I had dubbed the Phase-Organ. Lore claimed that only six Sirens could exist at any one time, but I had to wonder, was that true? Or were the Sirens the beginning of a new stage in human evolution? Even with the research I was doing on the three Sirens of the Crimson Raiders, plus the autopsy I did on Steele (whose body was, admittedly, ruined by both the wound the Destroyer left her with, and the cybernetics Claptrap used on her to revive her), I was still finding more questions than answers. An exciting thing for a scientist, to be sure. But still annoying.

We eventually reached the Slab King's lair. Angel had ECHO'ed in advance, so we were expected. I was carrying, with one hand, a plastic box with a caged front. I tried not to look at the now skeletonised remains of Handsome Jack and Nisha Kadam, still in cages. And still in the rotting remnants of their clothing. It had been, what, nearly two months since I killed them?

We stopped in the middle of an arena, where, above us, a muscled hulk of a man sat, peering down at us with his piggy little eyes. A grin split his brutal, scarred features. "Come on up, Slabs," Brick said. It was an affectation of his (not that Brick would ever use the word 'affectation') to call people he trusted a Slab. I was surprised he trusted Angel and me enough to call us that.

We walked up a series of ramps that allowed us to reach the crude throne where Brick sat, flanked by his guards. "Well, this is a surprise," Brick boomed, grinning. "I didn't think you guys'd show your faces here again. 'Specially you, Angel. I mean, your old prison's not far from here."

I winced, wondering whether Angel would take offence, but she didn't. "It's fine, Brick. As long as nobody tries to put me back."

"I wouldn't do that," Brick said. "Nobody in the Crimson Raiders would, and if any of my Slabs, or Hyperion tried, I'd punch their head off. So, what's the occasion?"

"Brick, you do know it's your birthday, right?" I asked.

"Of course I do, fool!" Brick said. "It'd be a really forgetful man who forgets his own birthday. But usually, the Crimson Raiders just let me do my thing. I often get roaringly drunk…"

"Emphasis on 'roar'," I remarked.

"…And fight it out with some of the Slabs. The others haven't really sent me anything on birthdays, not since I gouged out ol' Shep Sander's eyes out and cracked his skull open(1)." Brick shrugged.

"Well, we thought we should get you something. I mean, without you and the Slabs, I wouldn't have been able to leave Control Core Angel," Angel said. "This is sort of a joint present from the Crimson Raiders, but I had to fill out all the paperwork. So to speak: Phase-shift is very useful in fast-tracking it."

Brick frowned. "What is it?"

I proffered the carrier. Brick took it, almost reverently. He knew what was inside, that was for sure, and an almost childish glee came over him as he opened the door to the carrier, and delicately fished out a small puppy. It was sleeping.

"I looked up the breed of the one Nisha killed," Angel explained. "Well, wasn't a breed so much as a mongrel, but hey. I like mongrels."

"Me too," I said. "Mongrels show genetic diversity, whereas purebreds tend to be inbred. They make the Hodunks' gene pool look deep."

"Anyway, after I found another one, we paid for every vaccination I could find. She won't even go mad from a frenzyclutch bite," Angel said.

"She? Ah, yes. Y'know, for once your creepy watching of our lives works out, Angel," Brick said, quietly. "Does she have a name?"

"Not officially, not yet. You have anything in mind?"

Brick looked down at the puppy cradled in his hands, before coming to a decision. "Yeah. Karma."

"Nice name," I remarked. "Any reason why?"

"Well, it's like the universe is paying me back for Nisha snapping Dusty's neck. And it's a beautiful name. Anyway, you said it's a she, right?"

Angel nodded. "Your point?"

Brick grinned good-naturedly. "Well, they always say that karma's a bitch. Now that's truer than ever."

 **OMAKE 2 ANNOTATIONS:**

 **Originally, this chapter was titled 'Brick's Birthday', but after deciding on the puppy's name, I decided I couldn't resist the pun.**

 **1\. Shep Sanders is one of the mission providers in** ** _Borderlands_** **. Apparently he was also the one to sell out New Haven to Hyperion, leading to Brick killing him, and being banished from the Crimson Raiders.**


	13. Omake 3: To Thine Own Self Be True

**OMAKE 3:**

 **TO THINE OWN SELF BE TRUE (C)**

Angel and I were having a drink at Moxxxi's, one day, only a week after the death of Handsome Jack. In a way, Angel, Tim, Moxxi and myself had created an informal club: the Handsome Jack's Sloppy Seconds Club (the crude and informal name came from Tim), because the four of us had gotten screwed over by Jack somewhat more personally than most others here in Sanctuary. Moxxi somewhat more literally than the rest of us.

Moxxi, of course, had been Jack's wife (he was her fourth husband). Angel was his daughter, and his slave until recently. Tim was doomed forever to look and sound like Jack. And I? Jack took umbrage towards me because I loved his daughter.

Of course, many in Sanctuary still treated us with suspicion. Angel was well known for her role in the destruction of New Haven, and old grudges still ran deep, and Angel's new role alongside myself as Hyperion's 'ambassadors' drew yet more resentment to us. It was on that day that things came to a head.

We were nursing our drinks at Moxxxi's when it happened. A drunken patron came by, and then snarled at Moxxi. "Your bitch at the bar told me to vamoose. Said I had enough!"

"A half-blind retarded monkey could see that you've had enough, pal," Moxxi retorted. She wasn't in the mood to deal with him at the moment.

"You don' tell me when I've had enough!" the idiot snarled. "You traitorous bitch! Yer all traitors. The wife of Jack, his daughter, Jack himself, and the mad scientist…yer all traitorous Hyperion fucks! Especially you, you painted trashy _whore!_ " With that, he snatched up Tim's mostly-full glass, and dashed it viciously in Moxxi's face. "Let's see how many wrinkles and liver spots you have under that makeup, you inbred slut!" he screamed.

I thought Moxxi would get angry, that she would pull out one of her guns, and begin aerating this fuckhead. Instead, she began to wail and cry. Tim glared at the idiot. "What the fuck is wrong with you, man?!"

"Yer what's wrong," the idiot snarled, ripping Tim from his chair, and cocking back a fist. Only to be blasted back by a bolt of lightning that sent him juddering and convulsing into one of the slot machines.

"Bastard," Angel spat, before helping Moxxi up. Moxxi, however, shoved Angel away, and fled.

Angel and I exchanged looks. "What was that all about?" I asked.

"Ah, I think I know. Come on," Tim said, getting us to follow him. As we got out the back, he said, "Moxxi doesn't like being seen out of character, as it were. That's why she almost never takes off the makeup." For a moment, he had the air of someone about to divulge a secret, before admitting, "Back on Elpis, we had to find her, and we surprised her in a secret workshop, dressed in coveralls and without her makeup, singing and speaking with, well, you know how Scooter and Ellie speak normally."

We had reached a room, Moxxi's private dressing room, and Tim knocked on the door. "Moxxi, it's us. It's okay, we're here for you."

"Just leave me be," Moxxi said miserably. I realised her voice had lost some of its sultry sophistication, and not just because she sounded sad.

"Moxxi…please. Remember…shallow grave?"

Angel and I shared a look. What was that about?

The door opened, and Moxxi was there, in the doorway, sans hat. And sans makeup. Angel and I couldn't help but stare at the true face of Moxxi, revealed.

"Oh my God," I murmured.

"Moxxi…" Angel said quietly.

"What?" Moxxi demanded, irritated, and her accent slipping. Yep, she certainly sounded a bit more like her children. "Tim, I told you before I don't like people seeing me out of character."

"Why not?" I said. "You actually look much better without the makeup."

Which was true. Okay, her eyes were bloodshot and tears were making tracks down her face. She had wiped the makeup off her face completely.

But her skin was virtually flawless, save for the beauty spot just above her lips, and the faintest hint of character lines. Her brown hair framed a face that would definitely have launched a thousand ships. Her light green eyes stared into my own, searching for any hint that what I had said was a lie. If they weren't bloodshot, they'd be jewels.

With a vicious gesture, she indicated for us to get inside.

* * *

"You know I'm not proud of my origins," Moxxi said, quietly. We were sitting or standing around the relatively small confines of her dressing room. I saw all sorts of variations of her fetishized Mad Hatter outfit, along with a set of coveralls that looked well-used. And there were posters advertising her Underdome. "I've worked hard to distance myself from the Hodunks. My first husband was Jimbo Hodunk. I'm still not sure what relation he is to me, only that it was too close. He was the father of both Scooter and Ellie. A dirtbag and a cheat. And then, he had the gall to want to make Ellie the clan wife, the brood mare of the entire clan. That's why I left them, with the help of my next husband."

"Mr Shank," Angel said. "I remember watching as the Vault Hunters rescued Athena from him."

Moxxi nodded. "He was a nasty bastard, but when the Vault Hunters killed him, I realised what he had done for me. He helped me escape from the Hodunks, and I actually wept for him. And then, I married Marcus. It was he who helped me raise Scooter and Ellie. We parted ways civilly, more or less."

I resisted trying to think of a 'No Refunds!' joke. This was a serious, intimate, and personal moment. And Marcus, though he was an amoral profiteering scumbag, was nonetheless decent enough to those who he got used to.

"I needed to make a name for myself. I created a character, a persona for myself, to distance myself from my origins. At the time, I worked as a bounty hunter and assassin. For one job, I had to go undercover in a house of ill repute, where they were staging a burlesque version of _Alice in Wonderland_. As it happened, I was chosen to play the role of the Mad Hatter. I felt that I was more like the Red Queen, mad in the sense of being furious with the world, and the Hodunks in particular. I got the Underdome by killing my old employer. And, well, you know the rest. Someone once called me facetiously 'Mad Maxima', because he was an old movie buff. I just decided to call myself Mad Moxxi."

"Well, you've done really well for yourself," Angel said. "The Underdome, the Red Light, the Up Over Club, this establishment…not only that, but you have Scooter and Ellie. They may have their quirks, but who on Pandora isn't glad of a Catch-A-Ride when they need one?"

"And you helped save our lives on more than one occasion," I pointed out. "Remember when that mob went all Clockwork Orange on my arse? And you helped us during our trip to Oasis. That dickhead doesn't know the real Moxxi. He doesn't want to, either. But we do. We care. You don't have to be in character around us. If need be, we just do our little drinking sessions in private."

Moxxi looked at us, before nodding. "Okay. I'm…sorry you had to see that. I'm not usually like that. But I've been having nightmares about Jack lately. I'm a little frayed at the edges."

"You sure don't look it," Angel said with a smile. "If I'm like that when I'm your age, I'll be happy."

Moxxi smiled back, making her face look even more radiant than before. "It takes a lot of hard work, believe me."

"By the way, what did Tim mean by shallow grave?" I asked.

"Ah, yeah," Tim said, rubbing the back of his head sheepishly. "Remember how I said we caught her working at a robot? She threatened us to not say a word of it to anyone, or Scooter'd bury us alive in a shallow grave, like Lucky Zaford."

"Should I get Scooter to fetch the shovel, sweetie?" Moxxi asked, with a devilish glint in her eyes.

* * *

We weren't laughing a quarter of an hour later, when we learned that Scooter had found out about the man who had assaulted his mother. Roland spotted Scooter throwing the hogtied drunk man off the edge of Sanctuary near his garage, braying "Catch a Riiiide!" as he did so. Scooter was thoroughly unrepentant.

I guess we learned a few things that day. Firstly, that Moxxi is beautiful even without makeup. A bit shallow, but hey. Secondly, and more importantly, that we had seen a side of her that we didn't often see, and I for one felt privileged. Finally, and certainly important from a self-preservation standpoint, don't piss off Scooter, especially by doing anything to hurt his mother, because he WILL end you.

Even so, when we joined Moxxi and Tim to discuss our losses, sometimes with Tiny Tina in tow (although she didn't drink, obviously), she did so out of character, speaking sometimes in her more looser, Hodunk-like tones. And the thing is, it wasn't because she was more beautiful as Moxxi rather than her Mad Moxxi persona that I liked these gatherings. It was because I felt I was seeing the true Moxxi, the woman who would sacrifice anything for her children and her friends.

Slut. Whore. Those who threw those appellations at her like so much shit knew nothing. I doubt they ever would. They'd think I was having it off with her, when all I'd be satisfied with would be a hug. They only saw one side of Moxxi, and that's the only side they would ever want to see. They'd denounce her as a loose woman, even as they wanked themselves silly over pictures of her.

But I saw her as a good friend. And I hoped, by letting me and Angel in, she saw me as a good one too.

 **OMAKE 3 ANNOTATIONS:**

 **Originally, the third omake was going to be about Claptrap's birthday (which is a sidequest in the game, and will probably be the next omake story), but this idea occurred to me. I wanted to know, how did Snyder know what Moxxi looked like without makeup? He mentions this fact in the files he wrote. It took time to find the right reason.**

 **Now, I'm a little worried that Moxxi seems somewhat OOC here. But I'm hoping it's not too bad. Moxxi may enjoy battle and slaughter, but she's also very much a human being, and the drunk idiot's words caught her at a bad time. And given how much she hates being seen out of character in canon, I thought that if someone deliberately tried to remove her makeup in public, she might react badly. Normally, she'd be angry, but the drunk's words hurt her deeply.**

 **I also decided to fill in something of Moxxi's past. She's one of those characters who seems made for fanfic writers to write about. We know she's had four hubbies (Jimbo Hodunk, Mr Shank, Marcus, and Jack), multiple lovers…but what about her time prior to owning the Underdome? I decided to extrapolate from the facts and hints given in-game. Having Mr Shank help her escape from the Hodunks is a stretch, true, but she actually mourns his death in** ** _The Secret Armoury of General Knoxx_** **, and I thought this might be a good reason why.**

 **I also decided to give a brief bit about why she first dressed up as a fetishized Mad Hatter. Hey, it had to come from somewhere.**

 **My point is, I want to give a bit more depth to the** ** _Borderlands_** **characters. True, they're interesting in the game, but I also want to see the human beings behind the characters. Moxxi is particularly fascinating. She's a very sexualised character, but there's more fascinating about her than her cleavage. I hope that I did the human being behind the character some justice. I hope I do all the human beings behind the characters justice.**


	14. Omake 4: Claptrap's Party

**OMAKE 4:**

 **CLAPTRAP'S PARTY (C)**

" _Unce! Unce! Unce!_ Oh check me out, I'm dancing! I'm dancing!"

I resisted the urge to facepalm with considerable difficulty as Claptrap 'danced'. It had been a few weeks since Jack's death, and I couldn't believe that Angel and Tim had persuaded me to come here. The only other ones to come were Maya and Gaige, who were back from their latest trip to Overlook. Gaige had some sympathy for the robot, as did Maya. Tim had fought alongside Claptrap on Elpis, so I was told, and Angel had admitted that she thought the Claptrap line was endearing.

And me? Well, Angel wanted me to come. And I preferred not to disappoint her.

Even so, the venue for the event, Claptrap's 7th birthday, left a lot to be desired. Claptrap lived in one of Sanctuary's more seedy alleyways. And Claptrap himself was obnoxious and stupid. Not actually malicious, at least not most of the time, but he was like a loud, whiny, opinionated kid, self-centred and thinking he was funny.

Not to mention that it was this particular Claptrap who sparked off the Claptrap Revolution five years back. According to Roland (with Blake being rather circumspect about the matter), Hyperion had reprogrammed Claptrap to become a sort of character assassin, designed to ruin the Vault Hunter's reputation. But Interplanetary Ninja Assassin Claptrap (or INAC) decided instead to spark a robot revolution, to free his brother Claptraps from bondage.

I didn't like Claptraps before the Robolution, as it was dubbed. And I was visiting my parents on Pandora at the time it happened during a break at uni, and had to help them fend off Claptraps attacking, screaming " _EXTERRRRMINAAAAATE!_ " and " _Fleshies, dead ahead!_ " So I had more than a little hatred for the line, justifiably so. An AI was one thing, I had no problems with normal AI that acted like a normal, decent person, but obnoxious AI was another. Hell, I'd rather have conversations with GlaDOS, frankly. I'd have had more interesting conversation, even if she wanted to kill me, and I am sure she would've found the Sci-Zone fascinating.

Still, it was a sad fact of life that I had attended worse birthday parties. Like my own 24th, and my most recent. It was not long after my parents had died, and after one of my worst attacks of the Sci-Zone. Nobody came. Dave was on holiday, and just about everyone else I knew was either dead, away from Helios, or avoiding me. The best part about it was that Jack gave me the day off, and even then, he made it clear that it was intended as a token gesture.

It's only in retrospect now that I realise how needlessly cruel and spiteful he was to me. Not that I was the only one to get that treatment, but he seemed to make it personal with me. I think I know why. I had loved Angel, albeit in a rather childish way. And she still loved me. And he knew it, and so went out of his way to make me suffer, and thus, by proxy, her.

Mean bastard. I was glad he was dead.

I wasn't the only one present who thought so, though in Sanctuary, that wasn't difficult to find. The city's population was almost entirely composed of people who had a grievance with Jack. Of course, too many of them didn't seem to understand the difference between Jack and Hyperion, that with Blake in charge, Hyperion was changing for the better. It was still a heartless corporate entity, true, but it at least knew how to keep promises rather than stab you in the back. Or so I hoped. Blake was a slimy bugger, but the Crimson Raiders trusted him, to a point.

After showing off his terpsichorean skills (or lack thereof: maybe it should be called in Claptrap's case _derp_ sichorean skills(1)), Claptrap decided to mingle. And he decided to plump for being next to Angel and myself. I think I could understand his reasoning. I didn't like the little bugger, but Angel had a liking for the Claptrap robots, something she had admitted in Gaige's ECHO log broadcast not long ago.

For a time, we sat in awkward silence. I was amazed Claptrap didn't speak. Usually, the problem was getting the verbose little shit to shut up. I'd remembered, after asking Tim about Claptrap and the events on Elpis, actually going to see Claptrap, and asking him about what had happened. He was a boastful little shit, though, and a good chunk of what he said had to be taken with a small hill of salt. I had jotted down some notes about him in a journal of mine, and had written that I hadn't known his age. He was seven years old today. Which meant he was two when the Vault Hunters first came.

The thought sent a chill through my mind. What was it like, to wake up fully sentient, with a fully-formed set of personality traits within, but without any memories? What would it be like to have one's own personality changed according to the whim of a programmer?

Claptrap acted like a child. A petulant, foul-mouthed child with many adult characteristics. But in truth, that was probably because he _was_ a child. The thought put a whole new chilly perspective on him. There's that old cliché about a man being the sum of his memories. What if those memories were continually altered and erased?

"…I wish he was here," Claptrap said suddenly.

"Who?" Angel asked.

"Steve," Claptrap said.

"Oh," I muttered, remembering the cheerful bandit with the single-word vocabulary. "I'm sorry about that."

"Nah, you don't have to be. Jack was the one who ganked Steve, and you ganked Jack right back," Claptrap said. "And Nisha. Tried to get that Zer0 dude to high-five me for chopping off Wilhelm's head, but, well, he only has four fingers, and he was a bit reluctant. Actually, I should thank you for blowing Jack's head off."

"You're…welcome," I said. "I did it mostly for Angel and myself, though. We'd never be free without him dead."

"…How did it feel?" Claptrap asked. I blinked. I thought he'd ask it in a loud, obnoxious tone. But instead, it was quiet, almost compassionate.

"…Like I needed to get a drink and wash my hands afterwards," I admitted. "Took a day just to feel relief."

"…Same here," Angel said.

"Huh…" Claptrap looked out at Sanctuary. Then, his voice was back to its chirpy, cheerful self. "Actually, you know what I need? A holiday!"

"A holiday?" I asked. What would a robot do on holiday?

"Yeah, an old pal contacted me, said he had a deal for me for a flight to Aegrus."

Aegrus? That was a relatively small continent on Pandora. I knew only a little bit about it, mostly to do with the wildlife. Apparently Dahl used to have a small presence there, doing prospecting, but pulled out of that area, and left the convicts they had as a labour force there. They had apparently degenerated into savages. This was some decades before Dahl pulled out of the rest of Pandora(2).

Why would an old pal want to send Claptrap there? Surely there were easier ways of getting rid of the robot?

"Why Aegrus?" Angel asked.

"Why not Aegrus?" Claptrap responded. "Anyway, I'll be off through the Fast-Travel Station tomorrow. Thanks for blowing Jack's head off. He had it coming. Closest thing to a birthday present I ever had. Douchebag wiped out my entire line." He then looked up to Angel. "And thanks for getting the Vault Hunters to repair me five years ago in Fyrestone."

"You remembered?" Meeting my eyes, she explained, "I did a diagnostic for them using my Phase-shift, and directed them on how to repair Claptrap. Claptrap saw me."

"An angel of mercy if there ever was one!" Claptrap said cheerfully, and with such sincerity that I couldn't help but smile. I shared his sentiment. "You're lucky to have this babe as your wife, Doc!"

Well, at least he wasn't calling me Dick, like when we first met. And he was right. I was lucky. And for Claptrap to be so sincere, instead of his childish self…I smiled. "Thanks, Claptrap. Hope you enjoy your holiday."

"It's gonna be awesome!" Claptrap cheered.

 **OMAKE 4 ANNOTATIONS:**

 **This will probably be the last tale to be contributed to this work for a while. I hope you enjoy it, though. It's set after Snyder writes his thoughts on Claptrap down, but before Claptrap takes his holiday. And yes, that means he's going to interfere in Nakayama's plans.**

 **I thought I would add why Snyder hates Claptraps specifically. I think trying to fight them off during the Claptrap Revolution would engender a hatred of them. I also wanted to include a nice moment where Claptrap actually has a more human element to him. As Claptrap will play a big role in the latter half of** ** _Welcome to the Jungle_** **, I thought I'd also get him to be on better terms with Snyder.**

 **1\. Terpsichorean means relating to dance and dancing. 'Derpsichorean' is a term I made up (though doubtlessly some internet wag's already coined it before) whose meaning should be fairly obvious.**

 **2\. It bothered me as to how the savages, clearly human, ended up on Aegrus in the first place. This was my attempt to explain it, as well as some of the older structures you see in Aegrus.**


	15. Zagreus' Song Chapter 1

**With my inspiration for doing any more _Borderlands_ fics pretty much non-existent at the moment, I thought I would take the time to archive my older works in here: namely _Zagreus' Song, Fly Me to the Moon_ , and _Opening the Cage_. The first two were meant to be an AU of the Ballad of Ricky and Angel where Richard Snyder was kidnapped and experimented upon by Atlas, and got involved in the events of _Borderlands_ ( _Zagreus' Song_ ) and _Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel!_ ( _Fly Me to the Moon_ ). _Opening the Cage_ was meant to be a crossover between _Bioshock Infinite_ and the original _Borderlands_ , but that petered out. So, I'll be archiving those stories here, and in a few weeks, I'll be deleting the original posted stories.**

* * *

 _ **ZAGREUS' SONG**_

 **CHAPTER 1:**

 **I AM ZAGREUS**

I don't think my sister and fellow prisoner was a fan of my singing skills. Well, she was a sister in all but blood. Without her, I wouldn't have survived the hell that I had been brought into when Atlas decided to bring me into their ranks. But she didn't think much of my euterpean efforts(1). Anyway, I did it more to piss off the guard than I did her.

" _Jingle Bells, Mikey smells,_

 _Knoxxie's in a rut,_

 _Commandant Steele got tentacles_

 _Stabbing through her gut!_ "

"Shut up in there, will ya?!"

I blew a raspberry at the guard, and after the last flatulent echoes died away, I began anew.

" _Driving through the dust,_

 _In a shitty Lancer red,_

 _O'er the dunes we go,_

 _Shooting bandits dead!_

 _Pow! Pow! Pow!_

 _Bones grind under wheels,_

 _Under the sun so shining bright_

 _Oh what fun it is to sing_

 _A slaying song tonight!_ "

The door opened, with the guard coming in, ready to shut me up. Anger made him careless. But then again, half an hour of me singing songs would do that to the man. Frankly, I wasn't sure who'd snap first: my sister, or the guard. I guess I should be grateful it was the latter. I was a very good fighter, though my sister, being one of the Lance Assassins, was even better. The fight might have drawn the guard in, true, but that was a big if.

But with his attention on me, the guard's eyes were off my sister. And that was all she needed. Within a split second, her arms were around his neck. Within another split second, the man's neck was snapped, and he was on the way to oblivion. Or, if he was lucky and he had enough saved away, the nearest New-U station(2).

The man's body dissolved into a blizzard of blue particles. Ah. Definitely the latter.

"I don't think he liked my singing," I muttered, pouting.

"Zagreus," my sister said, tucking a strand of blue hair away from her similarly-coloured eyes. Her stern face was set in grim determination. "We need to be professional now."

"We're leaving the Lance, deserting our profession," I pointed out as we walked out of the cell. "Tell me, where does 'professional' come into it?"

"We don't need an argument on semantics now," my sister said. "We need to get out of here. He'll raise the alarm as soon as he is able."

"Well then. Clean and precise, or bloody and screaming?" I asked. "I mean, we might as well hurt them while we're getting out. Less resources to muster coming after us. Lots of disarray and chaos."

She considered this briefly, before nodding. "Disarray and chaos. That's what you're good at, Zagreus."

 **ZAGREUS AS**

 **THE SWORD-DANCER**

 **Why So Serious?**

"Whereas wisdom and strategy is what you're good at, Athena," I said. "Save for recently, anyway."

 **ATHENA AS**

 **THE GLADIATOR**

 **Piss Her Off At Your Peril**

"You know what they did to my sister," she said, clenching her fist.

Quietly, I said, "Just as you know what they did to my parents. So I know how pissed off you are. Let's use that, shall we?"

"Yes. Let's."

* * *

An eternity ago (well, really thirteen, but who's counting?), there was a boy called Richard Snyder. When he was six years old, he discovered, much to his understandable horror and that of his parents, that he had a condition known as the Sci-Zone. When he went into the Sci-Zone, he basically became a mad scientist, capable of feats of astonishing deduction and induction, at the cost of his morality going bye-bye.

When he first got diagnosed, he also met a girl by the name of Angel Clarke, the daughter of a programmer at Hyperion by the name of John Clarke. The two became friends, for they were both something of outsiders. Angel was, you see, a Siren, a girl with extraordinary powers. Her particular one was technopathy, the ability to hack without much effort any electronics…with her mind alone.

Two years after they met, however, Angel vanished, and John refused to tell Richard where Angel went, whether she died, or left, or was lying in a hospital bed, comatose. Richard persisted…but could get no answer from John.

It was a sad day, but it was far from the worst day of his life. He would get a whole lot of those.

One day, while he was walking home from school on Elpis, after parting ways with an acquaintance called Janey, Richard was abducted by scary men. Of course, there's all sorts of nasty things that men like that can do to children. But these men were not just thugs, but the best kind of thugs, hired by the Atlas Corporation.

You see, for some time now, they had been abducting children, and doing nasty stuff to them. Brainwashing them, training them in military arts. Most of them were girls, retained to become the Lance Assassins. But Richard was to become a special experiment. When in the Sci-Zone, Richard could instinctively target the weak points of the human body, and Atlas, in their dubious wisdom, thought that could be harnessed. They performed all sorts of experiments, designed to bury the sweet little boy that was Richard Snyder in the Sci-Zone.

Richard Snyder died screaming for his parents, for Angel. He fell screaming into the darkness within me. Now, there is only Zagreus. Madness embodied.

For some weird reason, the top brass of Atlas used Greco-Roman deities in their nomenclature. Or, if you want me to dumb it down, they had a hard-on for naming their top soldiers after figures from Greek and Roman mythology. You may not have heard of Zagreus, but what of the better-known god he is considered to be, Dionysus? Or Bacchus, his Roman equivalent? Now, I'm not one for partying or getting drunk, but Dionysus was the god of ritual madness(3).

In the field, I was meant to be a spy, a special operative designed to sow discord and chaos amongst the enemy, leaving them vulnerable to a strike. Where the Lance Assassins were the precise knife slipped between the ribs, I was the grenade chucked into the trench. Psychological warfare from the crudest kind to the most precise and terrifying.

In that time of harsh training, however, there was one who was a friend. Hell, we became as close as siblings. It may have gotten more intimate than that, but she wasn't interested. And I was fine about that. Until I knew for sure about Angel, maybe I would have held a torch.

Her name was Athena. She never told me her name before she got abducted by the Crimson Lance. Not that that was relevant. All that I knew was, she had a sister on Pandora. And I had my parents.

Until Atlas decided to tie up loose ends.

And the worse thing? They tricked us into doing it ourselves.

After Steele's failed attempt to open the Vault, Knoxx, along with myself and the Lance Assassins, were sent to restore order. And that's when Atlas made their mistake. Athena was sent on a night-time operation to purge the village where her sister was staying at. I was sent to seal the entrance to an Eridium mine Hyperion was in charge of. It wasn't until I saw the surveillance cameras that I saw my parents, dying as poisonous gas filled the mine. Athena, who was ordered to use thermal cameras, didn't realise she had killed her sister until it was too late.

To say that we were upset was something of an understatement.

Our reactions were how we came to end up in the brig together, awaiting court martial, and execution by firing squad. Wait, scratch the former. I doubt we'd get even that. We got a bit too 'stabby', as old Knoxxie put it, to even warrant a token court martial.

* * *

Now, I may be permanently insane, or at least thought of that way, but I'd prefer not to get my skull perforated. Brains belong _inside_ the skull, that's how they do their job properly.

After we set up a surprise, I then activated my ECHO device. Snyder had a music player, given to him by his mother. It was one of the things ripped from him. By no means the most important, but an object of such sentimentality was still an unpleasant thing to lose. I had the music player in the ECHO device, plus a bit of software that allowed me to hack the local ECHOnet and PA systems

Soon, raucous heavy metal music blasted out of the speakers. And then, the lyrics, spoken (or rather, snarled) by a man who sounded like he was trying very hard to vomit up his own larynx.

 _Go, now, if you want it,_

 _Another world awaits you._

 _Don't you give up on it,_

 _You bite the hand that feeds you_.

I noticed a marvellous expression come over the Lance soldiers present. Okay, they were wearing those damned helmets that seem designed to make you look like the tools of a totalitarian dictatorship, all sinister with glowing eyes, but you could see it in the way they stood. They had seen this happen to the enemy. Now they were in the very unenviable position of having it happen to them.

 _All alone, cold fields you wander,_

 _Memories of it cloud your sight._

 _Fills your dreams, disturbs your slumber,_

 _Lost your way, a fallen knight_.

The first one fell before he even realised his head had been removed from his body. The next one caught a glimpse of me, the last sight he would ever see. Probably just as well: seeing me with my eyes so wide and with a grin that belonged on a shark would've probably given him nightmares for the rest of his life (Athena called it my 'Alucard' look(4)). Thankfully, that wasn't really long.

 _Hold now, aim is steady,_

 _Another world awaits you._

 _One thousand years, you ready?_

 _The otherworld, it takes you!_

I danced amongst the soldiers. Poor bastards, really. They forgot that, while I wasn't quite on the level of a Lance Assassin, I was still above their own. I'd gotten my shields back, and my sword, and my beloved custom Maliwan sniper rifle. That was enough. They were guarding against people trying to break into the Crimson Lance HQ. Not people breaking out.

 _Go, into the sand, and the dust, and the sky,_

 _Go now, there's no better plan than to do and to die,_

 _Free me, pray to the fayth in the face of the light,_

 _Feed me, fill me with sin, and get ready to fight_.

" _Zagreus! With me!_ " Athena's voice snapped over our private ECHO link.

There was no mistaking where Athena was. Although she preferred stealth, when push came to shove and battle was joined, she was right in the thick of it. Being the top Lance Assassin also meant she got some of the best toys: she had retrieved her Kinetic Aspis shield, a massive metal and ceramic shield in the shape of a gear, with a small force-field extending from the shield when it was active. The idiots fired at it, though to be fair, they probably didn't know that a Kinetic Aspis shield was almost invincible. Instead, they kept shooting at it, hoping to destroy it by concentrating their fire, not realising that the Omega symbol embossed on it meant their end.

 _You know you will,_

 _You know you will,_

 _You know it, you know it,_

 _You know it, you know it, that you will_

 _You know it, you know it,_

 _You know it, you know it, that you will_

 _You know you will_

 _Fight, fight, FIGHT!_

 _Fight, fight, FIGHT!_

 _Fight, fight, FIGHT!_

 _Fight, fight, FIGHT!_

In a lull in the shooting, Athena hurled the shield. I once teased her, saying she was like Captain America, only female. She'd nearly shot me for that. But who was laughing now? As the shield hit the Lance soldiers, the stored kinetic energy from their gunshots discharged in an explosion that sent most of them flying, and pulped a couple of them. The shield returned to her arm. I smiled at the sight. I was deadly. She was deadlier.

 _Hope dies, and you wander,_

 _The otherworld, it makes you._

 _Dreams they rip asunder,_

 _The otherworld, it hates you._

 _Free now, ride up on it,_

 _Up to the heights, it takes you._

 _Go now, if you want it,_

 _Another world awaits you._

* * *

We hijacked a Lancer, and began hauling arse out of dodge. As we sped past checkpoints, an ECHO communication reached our ECHO devices. A long, weary sigh emanated from them, a very familiar one. " _General Knoxx here. I'd ask what you two think you're doing, but I think it seems fairly obvious. I'd also ask whether you know that what you're doing is desertion, treason, yada yada yada, but I'm pretty sure you two do know. I'm not stupid, and I know that neither of you two are. Well, not really. Hoping you can outrun us is pretty stupid, but I honestly can't blame you._ "

"Oh, really? And what about the Code 64s?" Athena asked. "What about my sister, and Zagreus' parents?"

" _That wasn't my idea, Athena. Mikey's little helpers had the idea. I actually warned them not to piss you guys off. Because I found it kinda sweet. Creepy, but sweet. I didn't have a problem with it. But my opinions don't count for much when the Admiral's still wearing pull-ups and is surrounded by ass-kissers who think they know how to run a military. Even Steele, heavy-handed bitch though she was, knew more about how to run an army._ " A long, weary sigh once more. " _Listen. I'm sorry, but I'm gonna have to put out a kill on sight order for you guys. Nobody leaves the Lance and all that crap. If it's any consolation, I think you guys did a way better job on this rock than most of the morons I have to deal with. Plus, I've just heard that little song you were singing to piss off the guard, Zagreus._ " A rasping chuckle coughed out of the speakers. " _Funniest thing I've heard in a long time. Goes to show how dull things really are on this ass-sphincter of a planet, bandits and tentacle monsters notwithstanding. You were entertaining, Zagreus, and you, Athena, you're the best goddamn soldier I've ever known. Sorry it had to be this way. Hope I can buy you drinks in Valhalla, or wherever we go after we die. Bye._ " And with a final click, he cut off the connection.

Suddenly, mortars began dropping around us. "Athena! Set your PTD to HADS mode!" I screamed, even as I did so with my own PTD.

And then, the Lancer APC was hurled like a toy hurled by the hand of a petulant child. As everything vanished in a blast of red, and consciousness left me, I wondered if this had been a good idea after all…

 **CHAPTER 1 ANNOTATIONS:**

 **Well, I'm sure you weren't expecting this. Of course, you wouldn't have been expecting the story, but still, this is a very different Richard Snyder to the one in the Ballad of Ricky and Angel. A bit of Deadpool, a bit of Gilgamesh, a bit of Hyde from the BBC TV series** ** _Jekyll_** **…this is basically what happens when Snyder is in the Sci-Zone 24/7.**

 **I had been considering a story where Snyder joined Atlas willingly, and worked as a scientific advisor to Steele during the events of** ** _Borderlands_** **, but decided that this story was more interesting, especially as this story has a very different take on Snyder's character, so much so that he doesn't even think of himself as Richard Snyder anymore. Which is going to scupper any actual romance he has with Angel in this story.**

 **He's not going to be paired with Athena either. I'm going with the canonical pairing for Athena (with Janey) in future stories, and as I'm not sure whether Athena is canonically bisexual or lesbian, I decided to plump for her being the latter. Her relationship with Zagreus/Snyder is as he states: that of siblings in everything but blood. They're also nice contrasts to each other: Athena is calm and stoic, whereas Zagreus is jovial and insane. Athena prefers to do things quietly and cleanly, while Zagreus, while he avoids being in the thick of battle most of the time, nonetheless likes things messy and loud.**

 **BTW, the lyrics are to** ** _Otherworld_** **from** ** _Final Fantasy X_** **, composed by Nobuo Uematsu, with lyrics by Alexander O Smith and vocalised by Bill Muir. Obviously, the copyright doesn't belong to me. But it's a pretty badass song for Athena and Zagreus in this story.**

 **1\. Euterpean is a very archaic term meaning of singing, in the same way that terpsichorean means dancing. These terms are named for the Muses of Greek myth.**

 **2\. I know that the New-U stations are not actually canonical to the story. I've made them canon for the Ballad of Ricky and Angel, but have hinted in that series, and outright stated here, that it is horrendously expensive.**

 **3\. Yes, this is true. I chose Zagreus as the name, though, partly in homage to the villain from the** ** _Doctor Who_** **audio stories by Big Finish Productions. Paul McGann plays Zagreus (an entity composed of anti-time infecting the Doctor) in the eponymous story with marvellous aplomb and madness. In case you're wondering how it's pronounced, well, the pronunciation in the audios is 'Zah-Grey-Us'.**

 **4\. You know how Alucard looks in the heat of battle during the events of** ** _Hellsing_** **? All bulging eyes and a big grin filled with teeth? I think you get the idea. I imagine Zagreus' victims would be scared of it.**


	16. Zagreus' Song Chapter 2

_**ZAGREUS' SONG**_

 **CHAPTER 2:**

 **CATCH-A-RIDE!**

I have something of a gift: being able to wake up swiftly, especially when danger is concerned. So it was to only the surprise of the man whose throat I held my sword to that, within three seconds, I was awake, on my feet, and having a sword at his throat. Yes, redundant statement there. Sue me.

I was also aware of our surroundings. We were in the middle of the Deep Fathoms, part of a desert that used to be an inland sea. Not far away was the infamous Underdome of Mad Moxxi, a local figure of some renown, apparently.

"Holy shit-nuggets!" the man yelped in a nasal drawl that would have marked him as being from the South, and from the less-cultured regions of the South, if we were on Earth. "How the fuck did you do that?"

"With difficulty," I said. I assessed the man, who appeared to be in his twenties, albeit aged by this godforsaken planet. He was shorter than I was, dressed in stained clothing. He wore a baseball cap with the silhouette of a naked, voluptuous woman with a tyre next to it. I frowned as I recalled the files on known persons of prominence on Pandora. "Your name is Scooter?"

"Uh-huh. Hey, is you Crimson Lance?"

"Not anymore." I removed the sword from his throat. "Scooter Hodunk, proprietor of the Catch-A-Ride vehicle digistruction stations," I said out loud.

He grinned. "Yeah, that's right. Catch-a-riiiide!" he brayed.

 **SCOOTER**

 **Mechanics Is His Best Stat. Charisma Is His Dump Stat.**

"I'm Zagreus, former Crimson Lance Psychological Warfare Operative and Assassin, Eris Group." My eyes flickered just behind his shoulder. "And that lovely young woman currently training an SMG on your skull is my sister, Athena, former Lance Assassin Omega Squadron Operative."

"Stand up slowly, and your hands above your head, please," Athena said. She kept her SMG aimed at Scooter's head.

"Hey, I've got little on me!" Scooter said. "Whaddya trying to do, rob me?"

"The question is, what were _you_ going to do?" Athena said, before frisking Scooter with a grimace of distaste. It was clear that she didn't enjoy touching his stained clothing, even with her bodysuit's gloves on her hands. She found something, and fished out a pistol from his jacket. The fact she could hold her SMG in one hand steadily said a lot about her strength.

"Hey, girl, that's jus' for self-defence. You'd be pretty dumb goin' into these lands without protection," Scooter protested.

"I know. What were you doing here?"

Scooter looked at me, a plea in his eyes. I raised an eyebrow. Eventually, he said, "I saw youse guys racin' away from one of the Lance bases. When I saw the Lancer get blowed up, I thought, well, why not salvage some parts? But then I saw youse guys appear closer to me. So, I thought I'd do the gentlemanly thing and help. I mean, if youse guys were getting blowed up while runnin' from the Lance, you may not be on the best of terms with them, y'know what I'm sayin'?"

My eyes flickered over to Athena, and nodded slightly. Athena then lowered her weapon. She then turned Scooter around by the shoulder, and handed his pistol back to him. "Sorry. But we need to be sure. We're both deserters from the Lance. There'll be a price on our heads."

Scooter scoffed. "Well, I fer one don' care! Lissen, while there be plenty o' folk who will turn youse in, most of the folk in New Haven and T-Bone Junction hate Atlas. Of course, that's a good reason ter lay low. They might try to kill you guys anyway. I know a place."

"Like where?" I asked, frowning.

"Well, see that lil place over yonder?" He pointed towards the Underdome. Casually, he said, "My mom owns it."

* * *

Scooter was annoying, with a high-pitched nasal bray for a voice with an accent so redneck, it wasn't funny. He wondered about my own accent, so I said I had originally come from Elpis. Which was the truth, or at least near enough. I guess Scooter hadn't heard an Australian accent before.

Even so, while annoying, I could tell he had a decent heart. More or less. I was rarely wrong with my impressions of people: my ability to process information, particularly biological information, meant that I could tell if someone was lying. Most of the time, anyway. Microexpressions and all that(1).

As he drove us away from our crash site in one of his vehicles, he asked, "How in the hell didja get away from that explosion? I don' think ya coulda been thrown free from that there wreck."

"Personal teleport devices," Athena said. "They have a setting Zagreus suggested be implemented in our own PTDs. A Hostile Action Displacement System, or HADS. He got the idea from an old TV show(2)."

"Basically, if it's on, when hostile action is sensed nearby, it teleports us over a relatively short distance, out of immediate danger," I explained. "Can't use that all the time in battle, obviously, but when a quick getaway is needed…"

"Hooeee, thass gotta come in handy," Scooter said with considerable understatement. He then gave me a sly look. "Hey, by the way, have you ever met that Steele chick?"

"Commandant Steele?" I asked.

"Yeah, yeah. I only saw a few ECHO broadcasts of her. Heart colder than ice, and she looked like she could get more sun, but hooeee, she hadda body! Ever seen her naked?"

I glanced at Athena and smirked, before I said, "Actually, I have."

"Wait, what?!" Scooter yelped.

"Yeah, that's right." I kept smirking. While I was telling the truth here, I was really only saying this to see what reaction I could get from the mechanic. Athena merely rolled her eyes, but the faintest of smiles was touching her lips. "As an operative, I have to know a variety of skills. Would you believe she taught both of us how to seduce people if necessary?"

"Whoa, no way, dude!" Scooter exclaimed. "Seriously?"

"Seriously," Athena said. It was an interesting experience. Apparently seduction classes was one of Steele's few known vices. The woman was so uptight and commanding and domineering. I guess seduction classes allowed her to blow off steam without blowing someone's head off.

"She was also a Siren," I added. "Actually, I heard another Siren was there when Steele became a shish-kebab."

"Oh yeah, Lilith. Nice gal. Not somebody yer wanna mess with, though, her or her friends. You do know she's a Vault Hunter, right?"

"We saw the wanted posters for the four of them," Athena said. "Though whoever chose the photos was…unprofessional." I noticed she had avoided saying 'pervert'. "He chose one that focused on Lilith's chest."

Scooter chuckled, and then said, in a somewhat darker tone, "Speakin' of chests, I'll thank you to keep your hands to yerself with my mom. She gets around a bit, but the last guy who hurt her, I buried alive.(3)"

"You can try," I said. "If I really wanted to, I could have your head off by the time your hands touch your gun. Though given who your mother is, you wouldn't have to worry about me getting away with anything. She'd probably have a good go at killing me herself."

* * *

Scooter left us near the entrance to the Underdome after ECHOing his mother. A pair of thugs were at the door, looking intimidating…well, enough to intimidate the usual bandit. I reckoned I could have taken their heads before their weapons cleared their holsters.

"Who're you guys? Atlas? If you're here to watch the games, just remember, don't cause any trouble. Or are you here to fight in the Underdome itself?" asked one of them.

"Neither," Athena said. "We're here to see Moxxi. Scooter said he ECHOed ahead."

"Sam, watch them." The first thug went inside for a minute, before coming back out. "Okay, Moxxi will see you. But you'll be escorted there. And you will have to give your weapons to the storage bank inside."

"Yeah, how about no?" I said. "Look, I understand why you want our weapons, you're just doing your jobs and all, but I'm not going unarmed into a situation where I could be betrayed."

"Zagreus," Athena hissed.

"Fine. You can take our guns, but we're keeping our swords. And Athena can keep her Aspis."

"The shield thing?" the first thug asked. "Fine. But any trouble, and we force-feed you lead sandwiches. Got it?"

"Crystal clear, mate," I said, handing the man my sniper rifle. "But I don't want it fucked around with, or I'll go all Alucard on your arse."

The man snorted, but took the rifle with all due care, along with Athena's weapons. He frowned when he saw the buttons as we walked into the Underdome's reception area. "It can switch between elements?"

"Yeah, and I said not to fuck around with it. If you have enough money and ask Maliwan nicely, they might sell you one. Can't get that one through Marcus, not easily, anyway."

"I wouldn't be so sure about that," purred a sultry voice, whose owner emerged from a doorway, strutting towards us in a sensual manner. She was dressed in a crimson, fetishized version of the Mad Hatter's outfit, albeit with elements of the Red Queen. Her face was covered in stylised make-up that made her look vaguely doll-like. A top hat was perched on her hair at a jaunty angle. Despite looking like some stripper in a themed erotic establishment, she moved with dangerous grace and authority, like a predatory cat on the prowl. "Having been married to the man, I know that there's very little he can't get."

"Mad Moxxi, I presume," Athena said.

"Got in in one, sugar," she purred, smiling. "But you can call me Moxxi."

 **MAD MOXXI**

 **Beautiful Buxom Bloodsports Babe**

"And you two are the Atlas defectors that my son radioed ahead about," she added. "So…I wonder, what are you doing here? What do you intend to do here?"

I looked at Athena. She was the one with the plan, usually. I had a vague idea of it, true, that we were going to strike back at Atlas, but she usually had something more planned in mind. I was more spontaneous. After all, the old cliché went that no plan survived contact with an enemy.

"Take revenge on Atlas," Athena said. "They took our families away. Zagreus and I are siblings save by blood, but the Crimson Lance tricked us into murdering our respective blood families. We intend to take them down, but we can't do it alone. It was lucky that we met, as I am aware that you have contacts on Pandora who may be able to help."

Moxxi frowned, considering this. Of course, there was little reason to trust us. "I'll tell you what…" she said. "You tell me some intelligence that might be of some use to us…and if it pans out, I'll contact some associates of mine. Last I heard, they're in Jakobs' Cove(4)."

"Let me guess, the Vault Hunters," I said. "The ones who were there when Steele got shish-kebabed."

"Yeah. Hope there's no hard feelings," Moxxi said.

"More likely that they'd have hard feelings against _us_ ," Athena mused. "We are Atlas, after all, former or not."

"All but one of them are sensible enough to listen anyway," Moxxi said. "Roland, Lilith, Mordecai, they do listen. Brick might be a bit harder to persuade. Now, talk…"

* * *

In the end, it took only a few hours for Moxxi to confirm the intel we gave her, which was mostly some decryption ciphers for the comms systems of the Crimson Lance. She was smirking when she came back to us. She had us brought to the Red Light, a bar near the Underdome.

I have to admit, she was attractive, and more than just her physical appearance. For all that she made herself out to be a sexpot, Moxxi had subtler nuances to her as well.

"So, now that your intel has worked out, I guess I can trust you a little," Moxxi said. Although she still had the flirtatious attitude, it was now more subdued, and her attitude more serious. "Your escape has made waves, you know, and not just because of that bomb you left behind. The top operative of the Lance Assassin Omega Squadron, and the most terrifying psychological warfare operative in Eris Squad."

"You flatter me," I said with a grin, giving Moxxi a bow.

"Quiet, Zagreus," Athena said, with a roll of her eyes.

"Comms chatter from Atlas is filled with panic. Already, the top brass is ordering higher bounties for you than the Vault Hunters," Moxxi said. "And before you ask, no, I won't be collecting. I want Atlas gone as much as you do, and you would be very useful in taking out the occupying force. But the Vault Hunters will be your best allies in taking down Atlas. They managed to give Steele a hard time, as you well know, and they've been the top fighters to participate in my tournaments for some time."

Suddenly, a shrill beeping emitted from Moxxi's ECHO device. "Well, well, well," she purred. "Speak of the devil, and they shall appear. They've come to T-Bone Junction. I can have you contact them. Which of you will do the honours?"

"The floor's all yours, sister," I said. "Remember when they wanted you to be a spokesperson for the propaganda films? You would've been great!"

"Bullshit. I have choked on the disingenuous lies forged by their corporate greed all my life, and it is a meal I will no longer stomach(5)."

"See?" I said, grinning. "You always did have a way with words, sister."

She scowled, but began speaking into the ECHO. Of course, while having allies would be good, I knew that, regardless of whether the Vault Hunters would help, I would do anything to bring Atlas down, both for my sister, and my blood family. Nothing else mattered.

 **CHAPTER 2 ANNOTATIONS:**

 **Another chapter down. We've met Scooter and Mad Moxxi. And finally, the events of the DLC proper will begin to take place, albeit from Snyder/Zagreus' point of view.**

 **Anyway, here's the details of Zagreus' Action Skill, as well as his (tentative) skill trees…**

 **ACTION SKILL** **:** ** _Dionysian Dance_** **. Similar to Krieg's Buzz-Axe Rampage. Zagreus basically goes into a berserker mode where he takes less damage and does massive melee damage.**

 **SKILL TREE 1** **:** ** _Why So Serious?_** **Designed to enhance the Dionysian Dance. Ultimate Skill:** ** _Zantetsuken_** **. When triggered during his Action Skill, Zagreus kills all enemies within a predetermined radius instantly, at the cost of halting his Action Skill.**

 **SKILL TREE 2** **:** ** _Could I Have a Hug?_** **Named for Melvin/Dark Marik's catchphrase in** ** _Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series_** **, this skill tree focuses more on buffs for Zagreus and his comrades, as well as debuffs for the enemy. Ultimate Skill:** ** _Eris' Touch_** **. Enemies shot by Zagreus have a chance to turn on their comrades.**

 **SKILL TREE 3** **:** ** _Little Yellow Boxes_** **. Named for Deadpool's signature thought boxes, these are mostly concerned with buffing Zagreus' melee, sniper rifle, and grenade abilities. Ultimate Skill** ** _:_** **undecided.**

 **1\. Microexpressions are considered to be one of the few reliable means of telling whether someone is lying or not, and one of their key researchers, Paul Ekman, was the inspiration for Dr Lightman in** ** _Lie to Me_** **.**

 **2\. Namely** ** _Doctor Who_** **, and specifically, the story** ** _The Krotons_** **. The HADS is a special system of the TARDIS that causes it to dematerialise if attacked, and then rematerialize when the danger has passed.**

 **3\. A reference to Lucky Zaford.**

 **4\. Which sets this scene in the last moments of** ** _The Zombie Island of Dr Ned_** **.**

 **5\. Cribbed from Athena's opening lines in** ** _The Secret Armoury of General Knoxx_** **.**


	17. Fly Me to the Moon Chapter 1

_**FLY ME TO THE MOON**_

 **CHAPTER 1:**

 **TAKE A RIDE ON THE BLACK DRAGON**

 _When the door to the interrogation room opened, and the familiar red-haired woman with the golden eyes strode in, I leaned back in my chair. "Well, I have to give it to you. As far as interrogation rooms go, this one's pretty comfy, even homely. Clean, but not clinical or sterile. Good air conditioning." I rapped my knuckles on the desk. "Hell, the desk will give a good concussion if you decide to slam my head into it. I'll give it at least four Jack Bauers, maybe four and a half."_

 _The woman across from me didn't share my good humour. Instead, she consulted a printout in her hands. "Zagreus. Birth name: Richard Snyder. Occupation: Mercenary, Assassin, formerly of the Crimson Lance Psychological Warfare Division, Eris Group. Adopted sister, so to speak, of former Omega Squadron Lance Assassin Athena. Deserted from the Crimson Lance two years ago…"_

 _"…Rather violently, I believe," I interjected with a grin. "I slashed up a lot of Lance idiots while my music player was playing_ Otherworld(1) _. Good times."_

 _The woman scowled, but continued. "Aided us in repelling General Knoxx. Joined Jack Clarke(_ _2)_ _in his quest for the Elpis Vault..."_

 _"You know this," I said in a bored, sing-song tone. "You were there."_

 _The woman finally looked into my eyes. As she glared, I scoffed. "What? Are you going to send me out to the firing squad, just because my sister and I worked with Jack? I'll be honest here, Lilith. We did more to save Elpis and Pandora than you, Roland, and Moxxi did. Jack is a dick. I won't make any bones about that. In fact, I daresay I've known him for longer than anyone in this place. But…well, you did_ _ **jack**_ _, if you'll forgive the bad pun, compared to us in stopping Zarpedon." As her eyes narrowed, I asked, "Did that hurt? Good. So did nearly killing us. I mean, I thought you were a friend, along with Roland and Moxxi, until you stabbed us in the backs. You're lucky Athena told me to stand down after that bullshit with the Eye, or else I would've diced you. So tell me, why are you really here, Lilith? If it's to ask why we worked for Jack, it's because we needed the money. Because we were mercenaries, not unlike you when you hunted the Vault."_

 _Lilith scowled once more, looking like she wanted nothing more than to set me on fire. But I did nothing but tell the truth, and she knew it. Eventually, she said, "You said you had information that could help us. We've received word that Jack has instigated a hostile takeover of Hyperion. Literally. He's throttled Tassiter, by all accounts, and intimidated the members of the board. Roland's getting people ready for war, as word on the grapevine is that Jack has New Haven in his sights. But I want answers. You said there were things that we didn't know about with Elpis, as well as claiming you knew something about the Guardian Angel. We've got enough time for you to tell the story. Plus, any insight you have into Jack and the other Vault Hunters. Wilhelm, Nisha, Lady Hammerlock…"_

 _"Huh. By the way, where's my sister? Or Janey? Or Tim? Or Claptrap?"_

 _"Moxxi is taking care of them. Athena is cooperating. And Tim's trying hard not to soil himself." Lilith leaned forward. "So tell me…from the beginning…why?"_

 _"A long story. Bloody long story. After that debacle with ol' Knoxxie, Athena and I were eking out a living, as hired guns. I noticed you guys never asked us to help out with any jobs, like that whole Claptrap revolution thing. Anyway, not long ago, we got a message from a Hyperion programmer and low-level surveillance officer. He didn't know who I was at the time, that I once knew him as Uncle John, and that he knew me once as Dick. Anyway, the message said, 'Come to the Moon. Hunt a Vault. Be a hero'."_

 _"And what did you find there?"_

 _"What do you expect? You were there. A lot of madness, a lot of death, both of which I contributed to…and a hero. Of sorts. Until he fell, like Lucifer, though I think he didn't have far to fall. Where did it begin? Well, tough call there, but I guess it started on the rocket to Helios…"_

* * *

I leaned back on the acceleration couch, scowling as the PA system pumped out some banal song. Appropriate, yes, but still banal as hell.

 _Fly me to the moon,_

 _And let me play among the stars_

 _Let me see what Spring is like_

 _On Jupiter and Mars…_

I grumbled as I looked at the status readouts on the screen in front of us. "This inflight movie is crap, isn't it?"

"Yeah," grunted a grizzled man with cybernetic limbs and a cybernetic eye, salt and pepper hair and beard giving him the air of a mercenary.

"What do you expect?" a woman about my age and with Indian features remarked. She looked like a cowboy…or rather, a cowgirl. "This is Hyperion cattle class."

"I know what will cheer things up! A good old-fashioned sing-along!" a rhomboid, yellow robot with a single eye chirped.

"No," my sister said. "Just no.(3)"

I looked at my sister, at her blue hair framing her features that were wonderfully beautiful, but set, almost perpetually, in a stoic, stern glare of concentration. She had her hood up. "Come on, sis, remember that singalong we had in the Crimson Lance brig?"

"I wish I couldn't," she groaned.

I pouted. "You're no fun."

"What did you sing?" the Indian woman asked.

I smirked, remembering that time in the cell…

* * *

 _I don't think my sister and fellow prisoner was a fan of my singing skills. Well, she was a sister in all but blood. Without her, I wouldn't have survived the hell that I had been brought into when Atlas decided to bring me into their ranks. But she didn't think much of my euterpean efforts(_ _4)_ _. Anyway, I did it more to piss off the guard than I did her._

 _"_ Jingle Bells, Mikey smells,

Knoxxie's in a rut,

Commandant Steele got tentacles

Stabbing through her gut! _"_

 _"Shut up in there, will ya?!"_

 _I blew a raspberry at the guard, and after the last flatulent echoes died away, I began anew._

 _"_ Driving through the dust,

In a shitty Lancer red,

O'er the dunes we go,

Shooting bandits dead!

Pow! Pow! Pow!

Bones grind under wheels,

Under the sun so shining bright

Oh what fun it is to sing

A slaying song tonight! _"_

 _The door opened, with the guard coming in, ready to shut me up. Anger made him careless. But then again, half an hour of me singing songs would do that to the man. Frankly, I wasn't sure who'd snap first: my sister, or the guard. I guess I should be grateful it was the latter. I was a very good fighter, though my sister, being one of the Lance Assassins, was even better. The fight might have drawn the guard in, true, but that was a big if._

 _But with his attention on me, the guard's eyes were off my sister. And that was all she needed. Within a split second, her arms were around his neck. Within another split second, the man's neck was snapped, and he was on the way to oblivion. Or, if he was lucky and he had enough saved away, the nearest New-U station._

* * *

"Hey, my singing got us out of the brig. Plus, Knoxxie said he found it funny. And that's saying something, considering what a killjoy the old cigar-smoking fart was like!"

Athena sighed, and looked at Wilhelm. "You see what I have to deal with?"

I sighed myself, before looking at the other passengers, a woman with skunk-striped hair, an aristocratic air, and an ice blue outfit that seemed somewhere between a hunter's outfit and a sophisticated dress, and a man with handsome, pointed features, a prominent jaw, and a green complexion.

"Hey, did you take those ginger pills, Double Trouble?"

The man nodded. "I fucking hate travelling. I get motion sick."

"Eh, maybe some music, some _good_ music, might help you take your mind off things," I said offhandedly, before pressing at my music player, connecting it to the ECHO device on my wrist, and then activating a special program of mine.

A scream of metal music emanated from the speakers. "Oh, good Lord," Athena murmured.

"Now this is more like it!" the grizzled cyborg said with a huge grin.

Then, the rocket shuddered, and we were beginning to move along the magnetic rail the rocket was mounted on. And as the engines roared into life, the lyrics began to come through the speakers.

 _If you wanna be_

 _Really happily_

 _Just come over here_

 _Listen what I say_

 _Take a ride on the Black Dragon!_

 _Room enough for everyone!_

 _If you have the time_

 _Be it night or day_

 _Just to feel alive_

 _Without any pain_

 _Take a ride on the Black Dragon!_

 _Room enough for everyone!_

 _Take a ride on the Black Dragon,_

 _If you're down and need some fun!_

 _Black Dragon!_

 _Black Dragon!_

And then, we felt ourselves being pressed into the seats more than ever as the rocket reached the end of the rail, where it curved up and arced into the sky. The artificial gravity kicked in, and while the ship was still rocking a little, we could get up in our seats a little.

As it turned out, it was somewhat necessary to do so. We heard a series of thudding noises from behind, and turned in our seats to find, much to our annoyance, we had picked up stowaways. Namely, a group of enterprising bandits who somehow boarded the rocket while it was moving, and were now set on hijacking it.

Now we couldn't have that.

 _Take a ride on the Black Dragon!_

 _Room enough for everyone!_

 _Take a ride on the Black Dragon_

 _If you're down and need some fun!_

One of them twirled around a buzz axe in a manner that was probably meant to be badass. I caused him to blink when I held up a notepad with '4/10 Badass Points' on it. With a vicious snarl, he raced forward, only for the cyborg to leap from the chairs, and shoot down at him from midair. If the bullets didn't kill him, the sharpened stock of the machine gun through his chest did. The cyborg then grinned viciously, making a fist, and summoning a pair of drones. "Come get some!" he snarled.

 **WILHELM AS**

 **THE ENFORCER**

 **Likes Robots, Fights, and Steak**.

Athena and I took that as our cue to jump over Wilhelm. Athena brought out her Kinetic Aspis shield, and activated it, the forcefield and hardened ceramic absorbing the force of the hail of bullets pumped into it. In a lull in the fighting, she threw the shield with a grunt, sending it into the chest of one bandit who didn't get out of the way. The shield returned to her arm.

 **ATHENA AS**

 **THE GLADIATOR**

 **Laconic. Loyal. Lethal.**

I charged forward as the bandits were getting over the shock of seeing one of their own get felled by the shield, and I charged forward, cackling like the madman I was, swords in hand.

 _Take a ride on the Black Dragon!_

 _Take a ride on the Black Dragon!_

The first one fell before he even realised his head had been removed from his body. The next one caught a glimpse of me, the last sight he would ever see. Probably just as well: seeing me with my eyes so wide and with a grin that belonged on a shark would've probably given him nightmares for the rest of his life (Athena called it my 'Alucard' look(5)). Thankfully, that wasn't really long.

I danced amongst the bandits. Poor bastards, really. They didn't stand a chance.

I skewered one, and looked him in the eye, grinning at him. "Why so serious?"

 **ZAGREUS AS**

 **THE SWORD-DANCER**

 **He Slices, He Dices, He Makes 13 Different Types of French Fry!**

"'Scuse me," came the voice of the cowgirl, as she began firing her revolvers into the other bandits with a skill that had to be seen to be believed. After she was done, she poked her hat up with her still-smoking gun. "How was that for you?" she asked with a satisfied smile.

I grinned. I liked her!

 **NISHA KADAM AS**

 **THE LAWBRINGER**

 **The Most Badass Gunslinger Since Roland Deschain(** **6)**

 _Take a ride on the Black Dragon!_

 _Take a ride on the Black Dragon!_

One last bandit confronted the Claptrap unit. The bandit seemed bemused when first a disco ball appeared above the head of the Claptrap, and then, he seemed to get a wizard's hat and wand, before finally getting a cowboy hat of his own, and shooting a rifle into the bandit, sending them both sprawling. Only Claptrap got up again, and leapt into the air. "YES!"

 **CLAPTRAP AS**

 **THE FRAGTRAP**

 **Believe It Or Not, He's Useful!**

I walked over to the other two members of our party. "Hey, Double Vision, are you still sick?"

He nodded, looking like he didn't trust himself not to vomit while trying to speak.

 **JACK AS**

 **THE DOPPELGANGER**

 **Double, Double, Toil and Trouble.**

I glared at the woman. "So why didn't you help us?"

"You seemed to have it all under control. Besides, I'm enjoying the spectacle. Better than an inflight movie."

 **LADY AURELIA HAMMERLOCK AS**

 **THE BARONESS**

 **Ice Queen She May Be, But She WON'T Be Singing 'Let It Go'**

Suddenly, alarms started blaring around the rocket. But not due to the intruders. We were being fired upon, from outside!

* * *

 _I looked Lilith in the eye. "You know, I wonder how it might have turned out if the Lost Legion hadn't attacked. Then again, considering what we learned on Elpis, maybe it was inevitable. I believe Zarpedon was trying to do something to save the universe. I just think she got the moral arithmetic wrong. But if she really had found the Vault long before we did, then it means that some sort of conflict was inevitable…"_

* * *

A shrill beeping signalled that a missile had locked onto us. I stared in horror at the readout. Wilhelm shook his head in denial, while Claptrap hugged Athena, who seemed bemused by the contact, but patted the top of the robot as comfortingly as she could manage. Her eyes met mine.

This was stupid. We were going to die long before the game…I mean, the mission even started. Just before the missile hit, scattering us throughout the ship like tenpins, and sending the ship itself on a potentially lethal collision course with Helios Station, I summed the prevailing mood in five words.

"Well…this is gonna suck…"

 **CHAPTER 1 ANNOTATIONS:**

 **And here it is: the first chapter of** ** _Fly Me to the Moon_** **. Those of you who have read** ** _Zagreus' Song_** **will notice a number of bits copied and pasted. There'll be more bits here and there.**

 **I like** ** _Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel!_** **, with my only real objection about it being that Lilith's character is derailed into being a total bitch. Yeah, Roland's dead, but Athena had nothing to do with that. She was a mercenary, and one who became disillusioned with Jack. If anything, Athena has more right to be angry with Lilith than Lilith does with Athena.**

 **Anyway, I think one of the main reasons that** ** _Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel!_** **got a bad rap with some people is that there was a lot of Aussie humour that many of the players (American and British) would not have gotten. I laughed when I saw 'the Grabba', but I'm sure many people outside Australia didn't get it.**

 **The lyrics were to** ** _Fly Me to the Moon_** **(otherwise known as** ** _In Other Words_** **, written by Bart Howard, and made famous by both Frank Sinatra and** ** _Neon Genesis Evangelion_** **) and** ** _Black Dragon_** **(written and performed by the Vines). Obviously, I don't own the rights.**

 **1\. In the first chapter of** ** _Zagreus' Song_** **, this is indeed what he plays while he and Athena escape from the Crimson Lance,** ** _Otherworld_** **being one of the vocal songs from** ** _Final Fantasy X_** **.**

 **2\. In** ** _You've Got to Hide Your Love Away_** **, I gave Handsome Jack and Angel the last name of 'Clarke', after Jack's voice actor, Dameon Clarke. This tradition continues here.**

 **3\. I actually captioned a screenshot from the Pre-Sequel in the same manner, only it was Wilhelm who said 'This inflight movie is crap', and Athena who said, 'Yes', and for Nisha to say 'No' to Claptrap's offer of a singalong. The screenshot is amongst those on my Steam account. Why waste good material?**

 **4\. (Reproduced from the relevant annotation in** ** _Zagreus' Song_** **) Euterpean is a very archaic term meaning of singing, in the same way that terpsichorean means dancing. These terms are named for the Muses of Greek myth.**

 **5\. (Reproduced from the relevant annotation in** ** _Zagreus' Song_** **) You know how Alucard looks in the heat of battle during the events of** ** _Hellsing_** **? All bulging eyes and a big grin filled with teeth? I think you get the idea. I imagine Zagreus' victims would be scared of it.**

 **6\. Roland Deschain, aka Roland of Gilead, is the main protagonist of Stephen King's epic fantasy series** ** _The Dark Tower_** **.**


	18. Fly Me to the Moon Chapter 2

_**FLY ME TO THE MOON**_

 **CHAPTER 2:**

 **HELL ON HELIOS**

You know that old cliché about your life flashing before your eyes? It happened, in that instant between the crash, and my waking up. It wasn't a pleasant experience, as my life was not a pleasant one.

An eternity ago (well, really fifteen years, but who's counting?), there was a boy called Richard Snyder. When he was six years old, he discovered, much to his understandable horror and that of his parents, that he had a condition known as the Sci-Zone. When he went into the Sci-Zone, he basically became a mad scientist, capable of feats of astonishing deduction and induction, at the cost of his morality going bye-bye.

When he first got diagnosed, he also met a girl by the name of Angel Clarke, the daughter of a programmer at Hyperion by the name of John Clarke. The two became friends, for they were both something of outsiders. Angel was, you see, a Siren, a girl with extraordinary powers. Her particular one was technopathy, the ability to hack without much effort any electronics…with her mind alone.

Two years after they met, however, Angel vanished, and John refused to tell Richard where Angel went, whether she died, or left, or was lying in a hospital bed, comatose. Richard persisted…but could get no answer from John.

It was a sad day, but it was far from the worst day of his life. He would get a whole lot of those.

One day, while he was walking home from school on Elpis, after parting ways with an acquaintance called Janey, Richard was abducted by scary men. Of course, there's all sorts of nasty things that men like that can do to children. But these men were not just thugs, but the best kind of thugs, hired by the Atlas Corporation.

You see, for some time now, they had been abducting children, and doing nasty stuff to them. Brainwashing them, training them in military arts. Most of them were girls, retained to become the Lance Assassins. But Richard was to become a special experiment. When in the Sci-Zone, Richard could instinctively target the weak points of the human body, and Atlas, in their dubious wisdom, thought that could be harnessed. They performed all sorts of experiments, designed to bury the sweet little boy that was Richard Snyder in the Sci-Zone.

Richard Snyder died screaming for his parents, for Angel. He fell screaming into the darkness within me. Now, there is only Zagreus. Madness embodied.

For some weird reason, the top brass of Atlas used Greco-Roman deities in their nomenclature. Or, if you want me to dumb it down, they had a hard-on for naming their top soldiers after figures from Greek and Roman mythology. You may not have heard of Zagreus, but what of the better-known god he is considered to be, Dionysus? Or Bacchus, his Roman equivalent? Now, I'm not one for partying or getting drunk, but Dionysus was the god of ritual madness(1).

In the field, I was meant to be a spy, a special operative designed to sow discord and chaos amongst the enemy, leaving them vulnerable to a strike. Where the Lance Assassins were the precise knife slipped between the ribs, I was the grenade chucked into the trench. Psychological warfare from the crudest kind to the most precise and terrifying.

In that time of harsh training, however, there was one who was a friend. Hell, we became as close as siblings. It may have gotten more intimate than that, but she wasn't interested. And I was fine about that. Until I knew for sure about Angel, maybe I would have held a torch.

Her name was Athena. She never told me her name before she got abducted by the Crimson Lance. Not that that was relevant. All that I knew was, she had a sister on Pandora. And I had my parents.

Until Atlas decided to tie up loose ends.

And the worse thing? They tricked us into doing it ourselves.

After Steele's failed attempt to open the Vault, Knoxx, along with myself and the Lance Assassins, were sent to restore order. And that's when Atlas made their mistake. Athena was sent on a night-time operation to purge the village where her sister was staying at. I was sent to seal the entrance to an Eridium mine Hyperion was in charge of. It wasn't until I saw the surveillance cameras that I saw my parents, dying as poisonous gas filled the mine. Athena, who was ordered to use thermal cameras, didn't realise she had killed her sister until it was too late.

To say that we were upset was something of an understatement.

Our reactions were how we came to end up in the brig together, awaiting court martial, and execution by firing squad. Wait, scratch the former. I doubt we'd get even that. We got a bit too 'stabby', as old Knoxxie put it, to even warrant a token court martial.

We escaped, and ended up helping a quartet of mercenaries kill our former employers. Fun times, huh? Of course, you know that story, Lilith. You were there.

But you weren't there when the Lost Legion began invading Helios…

* * *

One of the worst ways to come out of unconsciousness (at least while not in an immediately life-threatening situation) is to be woken up by the inane chatter of a Claptrap unit. One came to greet us, sprawled on the ground near a rent in the rocket's side.

"Hello, Vault Hunters, and thank you for answering Hyperion's summons! Unfortunately, the Helios Space Station is currently under attack by insane Dahl military forces! Come with me! I can take you to your contractor liaison!"

Athena helped me to my feet, and I helped Jack's body double to his own. The others were already staggering after the Claptrap unit, as it began moving off, wanting us to follow it to Jack.

I won't go into detail about what happened there. We went through the station, the Helios Claptrap unit making banal observations, Loaders running around trying to repair things or avoid getting shot, and a group of Dahl soldiers ambushing us. Then, we came across a door where a Loader was lying, broken and shattered.

"Well, the Lost Legion must've killed this one. People think robots can't feel pain, but we actually feel it in slow motion, with great intensity! This robot died in horrific agon-!"

The Claptrap, as it opened the door, was turned into metal Swiss cheese mid-sentence by a volley of bullets and laser shots. We returned fire on the Dahl soldiers, and then, we heard our employer over our ECHO devices. " _Hey, did that Claptrap die? That's awesome! You guys the Vault Hunters I hired?_ " Before we could reply, we heard another volley of shots from the ECHO, and Jack yelped, " _Damn! HELP!_ "

The seven of us burst into the control room where we saw a man, with a jutting chin and thin, handsome looks firing wrist lasers desperately at a group of soldiers swarming at him. "HELP! Lots of help! I dunno who these assholes troops are, or why they have a murder-on for this space station, but they have me pinned!" Even as he felled a few of the soldiers, another managed to get the drop on him, sending him spinning to the floor with a powerful punch.

 **JACK CLARKE**

 **The Jawline of Dan Dare. The Smile of a Bastard(** **2)** **. The Attitude of a Dork.**

We waded in, and killed the soldiers surrounding Jack. But as we finished up, more soldiers swarmed in. Athena looked to me and Jack's double. "Zagreus, Other Jack, guard him. Zagreus, heal him."

I nodded, my face set in a grim expression, as I took an Insta-Heal vial from a supplies pouch, and jabbed it rather viciously into Jack's leg. Over the ECHO, we heard an older woman's voice announce, " _Attention, Hyperion: Your Helios Space Station now belongs to the Lost Legion. Surrender before it's too late._ "

Jack shook his head. "Crazy bitch." He then looked up at me, and froze, his eyes wide.

I looked back at him myself. "Hello, Uncle John."

"Dick?" Jack asked. "Little Richard Snyder? God, I thought I had seen a ghost when I saw the pictures of Zagreus."

"You did. Richard Snyder died screaming for his parents and Angel. There is only Zagreus now."

"Whoa…that's freaky. Okay, well, 'Zagreus', you ready to kick some Dahl nutbar ass?"

"Of course."

The body double frowned. "How do you know this guy?" he asked.

"His family knew mine," Jack said. "He got abducted by Atlas for the Crimson Lance when he was, like, ten years old. Looks like they turned you into a stone-cold psycho, Richard."

The others soon mopped up the Dahl soldiers, and we helped Jack to his feet. "Whoo! Thanks for that! Holy crap, you saved my life! Thanks! Sorry, my heart's pounding, never really got shot at before…kind of exhilarating, really."

"What's going on, Jack?" Nisha asked. "What the hell are these idiots doing here?"

"Your guess is as good as mine, babe," Jack said, panting. "These crazy bastards attacked right after I sent for you guys. If we can drive them off, then we're free to look for the Vault on Elpis." He then turned to a console, and began tapping at it. "Here, let me activate the defence systems. In a few seconds, we'll have turrets, laser wires, forcefields, the works. These assholes won't know what hit them."

As if on cue, the computer said, almost as if discussing the weather, " _Critical failure. Helios defence systems are being jammed._ "

"Marvellous," I remarked.

"What the hell? How?" Jack yelled.

" _Jamming signal originates from Elpis._ " Turrets began to descend on either side of the control panel.

"Shit! Kill the turrets, kill the turrets!" Jack babbled in a near-panic. Athena, Wilhelm, and myself complied instantly. "Dammit, this day gets better and better. Plan B! If we can't retake Helios, then we need to get the hell out of here. Follow me to the evacuation ships!"

As we followed Jack, we heard the woman from earlier yell over the ECHOnet " _We MUST take this ground!_ "

"Who's the crazy chick?" Nisha asked.

"Umm, she leads these jackasses, I think? Look, it doesn't really matter. The first person to shoot her in the head gets a high-five and a turbomansion."

"Meh, I'd prefer a sexy robot girlfriend and a decent house," I only half-joked.

Nisha gave me an amused look. "What, I ain't good enough for you?"

"Trust me, Nisha, you'd be shooting him before a week is out," Athena said. "I'm his sister, and he drives _me_ crazy."

"And that's a short trip," I remarked, earning another glare from my sister. "Anyway, Nisha, you're hot, but I've seen the way Jack's eyeing you up. I don't wanna get in the way. I'm a sadist, not a masochist."

Nisha smirked. "Pity."

"Hey, if we're done with the banter, we've got to get going!" Jack said. "The escape ships are this way!"

* * *

We scurried onward to a door leading to a landing area, only to find a Dahl mecha emerging from an elevator, and shooting the ships. The cockpit was open, revealing a middle-aged but fit woman with stern features…and glowing purple eyes. Which are never a good sign. Especially when accompanied by glowing purple scars running from the eyes. She looked familiar, perhaps from a file I had once perused while I was still part of the Crimson Lance.

"Son of a taint," Jack cursed when the woman shot them down, before he did a double take. "Hey, it's that bitch! Shoot her!" He yelled.

The woman turned to face us. "Hello, Jack," she said, very calmly, despite having eight sets of weapons pointed at her.

"Shit," I said, finally recognising her. I remembered her because, shortly before my abduction, she had been on the news on Elpis for disappearing, along with an entire Dahl legion. "That's Colonel bloody Zarpedon!"

 **COLONEL TUNGSTEENA ZARPEDON**

 **The Road to Hell is Paved With Good Intentions.**

"Who cares? Fire!" Jack yelled.

But even as everyone else did, Athena and I didn't, as we suddenly saw something moving so fast, it was a blur. Even I, with my brain locked permanently into the Sci-Zone, only got a brief impression of something flipping over and over, before it was in front of Zarpedon, a hand outthrust, and the bullets frozen in front of it.

The creature was elongated and strange. I recognised the general shape from the reports Commandant Steele had sent of strange, alien entities that had attacked her men as they had approached the Vault, strange insect-like humanoids that moved with a strange grace and agility, and wore bizarre masks. This creature fit the description, as well as holding a massive halberd.

" _Naughty…_ " it said chidingly in a distorted, warped voice that was vaguely androgynous.

 **THE WATCHER**

 **Well, That's Fucking Ominous. Not To Mention Enigmatic.**

"Okay, new plan," Jack said. "Retreat!"

We dived back inside the doors just as Zarpedon closed up her mecha's cockpit, and began firing around her alien ally. As the door closed, I yelled, "That was a motherfucking _alien!_ "

"No shit, Sherlock!" the double snapped. He looked the most out of his depth of all of us.

"How did you know who that woman was?" Wilhelm asked, frowning. Other than my sister, he was probably the calmest and collected.

"Just before I was kidnapped by Atlas, her disappearance, along with that of an entire Dahl Legion, made news on Elpis. I think Dahl hastened to cover it up. I guess something happened to her, other than death. Eyes should not glow like that, if at all."

"Dick, we're in agreement on that point," Jack said, panting in panic. "Now, I suggest getting the hell out of here. We'll need to find another way off the station, if we can avoid running into that thing again. Dunno what the hell that alien was, but I'd put money on the fact that it can kill us with its brain…"

 **CHAPTER 2 ANNOTATIONS:**

 **Second chapter down. Zagreus' past revealed (though you would have read that in Zagreus' Song, had you read that), and Zagreus meets Jack for the first time in years. A heartwarming reunion it ain't.**

 **1\. (Reproduced from the relevant annotation in** ** _Zagreus' Song_** **) Yes, this is true. I chose Zagreus as the name, though, partly in homage to the villain from the** ** _Doctor Who_** **audio stories by Big Finish Productions. Paul McGann plays Zagreus (an entity composed of anti-time infecting the Doctor) in the eponymous story with marvellous aplomb and madness. In case you're wondering how it's pronounced, well, the pronunciation in the audios is 'Zah-Grey-Us'.**

 **2\. 'The jawline of Dan Dare and the smile of a bastard' was how Steven Moffat first described Captain Jack Harkness in his script for** ** _Doctor Who: The Empty Child_** **. It's fitting, as I have read somewhere that Handsome Jack was actually named for Captain Jack Harkness. Incidentally, Dan Dare was a famous science fiction comic series from the Fifties and Sixties about a space-faring pilot.**


	19. Fly Me to the Moon Chapter 3

_**FLY ME TO THE MOON**_

 **CHAPTER 3:**

 **MOONFALL**

As we scurried into an office, an ECHO communication came through. Although meant for Jack, it came through to all of our ECHOs. The avatar showed a fussy-looking man, and the caption said 'Tassiter'. Oh yes, the CEO of Hyperion. And all-round arsehole, if the Atlas file on him was any good.

" _Jack, what the hell is going on?_ " Tassiter demanded. " _I'm getting reports of alarms going off all over Helios…_ "

"Nothing sir," Jack said hastily. "Just, uh…one of the Claptrap units decided to try French-kissing a light-socket."

Tassiter groaned. " _Need I remind you that you are there to observe Pandora, nothing more. If you incur any damages to Helios Space Station…_ "

I snarled, and punched the transmission key on my ECHO device. "Ahoy there, Tassiter!" As Jack looked at me in horror, and waved at me to be quiet, I continued, "There _are_ damages being incurred to Helios, but by a bunch of nutjob Dahl nutjobs."

"Oh, son of a taint…" Jack groaned quietly, burying his face in his hands.

"… _Who is this?_ " Tassiter asked, bemused.

"Zagreus, one half of the magnificent mercenary sibling duo Athena and Zagreus." Athena facepalmed. "Sorry, we were in the area, looking to head to Elpis, try and seek our fortune you know, when these Dahl arseholes fired on our ship and sent it off-course, crashing into Helios. Now some rogue Dahl nutjobs are trying to take Helios over. Unfortunately, the defences are being jammed by a signal coming from Elpis. So we've got to find a way to get to Elpis and stop whatever's fucking with Helios' defences. Any questions?"

Tassiter spluttered in confusion, before finally saying, " _I have plenty. But for now, if you do manage to get rid of the jamming signal, then I will overlook your 'coincidental' appearance on Helios. Jack, do not fail me. Tassiter out._ "

Jack let out a sigh of relief he didn't know he was holding. "Okay…may just have saved my bacon there."

"For the second time. First time it was physically, second time it was metaphorically." I grinned winningly. Only for Athena to cuff me on the back of the head.

"You got lucky there," Athena muttered.

* * *

 _I looked at Lilith. "I should really skip past the next few bits. Only a couple more interesting bits happened before we reached the moonshot cannon. The first was that Jack demanded what Zarpedon wanted. She actually replied."_

 _"What did she say?"_

 _"That she wanted Helios, and she wanted to save the universe."_

 _The golden-eyed woman blinked. "Huh. That sounds a bit like hyperbole."_

 _"True, but given what happened later, well…anyway, the second thing that happened was that we fought this Dahl guy in a flamethrower-equipped mecha. Yelled something like 'be cleansed with heat' or something like that. I find it hard to describe a battle, anyway. I usually just go with the flow, and slice and dice things up. His mecha was already damaged when he arrived, anyway, though he put up a fight when it got destroyed. Anyway, we got to the moonshot cannon, had to use a moonshot bullet instead of a lift, blah blah blah…and then, some Dahl arsehole shot the moonshot control panel. The upshot was that someone had to stay behind because the automated systems were fucked. Now, I know you're not going to believe this, but Jack volunteered to stay behind."_

 _"Bullshit," Lilith growled, her eyes narrowing._

 _"Hey, I have the ECHO recording to prove it. I was worried we weren't going to get paid, so I started recording it on my ECHO so that I could put Tassiter on the spot should Jack bite the dust." I pressed a button on the ECHO device on my arm._

 _Athena's voice came out._ "You're staying? You'll likely die."

"Yeah," _said Wilhelm_. "I'd better get paid if you bite it."

"Eh, you guys saved my life a couple of times, I'm repaying the favour," _Jack said_. "Besides, I'm a hero, baby. Self-sacrifice is part of the job."

 _Lilith made a gagging noise._

 _My voice came from the ECHO recorder._ "Okay, Jack, but there's one thing that I want as well as the money, assuming we all survive."

"What's that, Dick?"

"…I'm Zagreus. And I want to talk to someone I haven't seen for years."

"…You mean my daughter, right?" _Jack sighed_. "Help me with the Vault, and I'll think about it."

"Okay. Now, listen up you lot. Take these, and put them on your shoulders. They're OZ Kits. Basic devices for forcefield-based counterpressure and oxygenation. I bought them when I heard we were going to Elpis. Luckily, I had spares."

"Who died and made you leader, hmm?" _came the haughty tones of Lady Hammerlock_.

"I'm not. Think of me as a quartermaster. Someone who, while crazy, also has just enough common sense. I mean, I assume you're not into suffocation?"

"Not outside the bedroom," _Nisha's voice said_.

"Then put them on. Claptrap, I've even got one for you. I know you don't need oxygen, but OZ Kits can also be used as a jetpack. But the jetpack function uses your oxygen supply. Don't piss it up the wall."

 _I stopped the recording. "Sounded like you led that group," Lilith mused._

 _"It was more Athena and myself. She was the leader, and I was her second in command. Wilhelm and Nisha didn't like it, and nor did that bitch Hammerlock. Anyway, Jack had formulated some brilliantly insane plan to get to Elpis via the moonshot. Crazy as shit, and we nearly died in the process, but we got there. Just as well I got those OZ Kits too. He deluded himself into thinking he was a hero, but given what we saw later…well, he was pretty self-delusional. Especially knowing what I know now."_

 _"…Why did you ask Jack about his daughter? I didn't know he had one."_

 _"True. But you know her." I looked up at her. "Not very well, AS you've only seen her as an image on your ECHO. I've known her since she was a girl my age. We both had unusual conditions. I had the Sci-Zone. And she was a Siren."_

 _Lilith's eyes widened. "A Siren? Who is she?"_

 _"Her name is Clarke. Angel Clarke. Does that give you enough of a hint?"_

 _Lilith's eyes widened. "Jack's daughter…is the Guardian Angel?!"_

 _"Yeah. And I'm certain that she's not a willing accomplice."_

 _The older Siren ran a hand through her fire-red hair, before she shook her head. "Okay, never mind about Angel for the time being. Back to your story…"_

* * *

The landing on Elpis was definitely a rough one, and I ended up at the bottom of a pile of several people. A voice was calling over the ECHO devices on our wrists. " _Hello? Hello? Are ya listening in there?_ " It was the distinctive Aussie twang common to many inhabitants of Elpis. And there was something about the ECHO avatar, of a young blonde woman, that was vaguely familiar.

"Yes, we copy," Athena said, getting to her feet, as did everyone else. "Is everyone all right?"

A series of various affirmatives rang out, culminating in me saying, "My dignity has been crippled, never to walk again. But otherwise, I'm fine."

" _Well, you're far from fine, mates_ ," came the voice from outside. " _You're about to die. There's only limited oxygen in that container, and once ya open it up, all the air's going to vent._ "

"We've all got OZ Kits…hopefully not damaged." I checked mine over, and did the same with the others. "Yeah, we're good."

" _Okay, nice. You sound like ya come from these parts, mate. Nice preparation. Okay, well, when you're ready, open her up, and follow me to my place. It's not too far._ "

Wilhelm smashed the button, and we were blown out of the container by the outrushing air. The woman who was waiting nearby as our OZ Kits deployed was blonde, dressed in jeans, a midriff-baring tank top, and a jacket, the distinctive helmet-like forcefield of an OZ Kit over her head. She had short blonde hair, dark eyes, a bandage on her nose, and burn scars over part of her neck and midriff.

I blinked as I recognised her. "Janey? Little Janey Springs?!"

 **JANEY SPRINGS**

 **Good Heart. Great Scavenging. Bad Writing.**

She blinked as she peered at me. "Do I know you?"

"You knew who I used to be. Look, can we get to some sort of shelter?"

"Sure."

* * *

Back in school, Janey Springs wasn't exactly a friend. I had pretty much none of those, especially with the Sci-Zone hanging over my head. But we were on fairly good terms. She was a cute, rambunctious little thing. For some weird reason, she tended to speak with a stronger Aussie accent than the norm, sounding a bit like Crocodile Dundee.

We made it back to her outpost, which she called Ozless Harbour. I couldn't help but notice that Janey's eyes roved up and down Athena's body appreciatively. I knew my sister batted for the same team, but it was a mild surprise to notice Janey did so too(1).

Introductions were made. She cooed appreciatively at Wilhelm's beard and cybernetic eye, and gave a rather flat response towards Jack's double's attempt at flirting. She then peered at me. "Actually, if she's Athena, does that make you Zagreus? One of the two Crimson Lance deserters who helped the Vault Hunters off Knoxx?"

"Indeed."

"Strange. You seem to know me, but I know I don't remember a Zagreus…" Suddenly, a switch seemed to flick in her head, and her eyes widened. "Whoa, wait a tick! Dick Snyder? Poor little kid who had the mad scientist thing in his head? Got kidnapped? You're Dick Snyder?"

"…I was."

Her face fell, and she peered at me. "...Strewth, what the hell did Atlas did to you?"

"Hell is the right word," Athena said. "He and I went through much of the same hell. It's how we came to call each other siblings. Listen, as much as I hate to break up the reunion, we have a job to do. Miss Springs…"

Janey gave a winning smile. "Call me Janey."

"Janey…okay, well, we just came from Helios. There's a jamming signal that we need to get rid of, a signal that Colonel Zarpedon is using to help her conquer Helios. Would you have any idea?"

"Nope. I'd say, go to Concordia, and talk to the bloke in charge there, the Meriff. The problem is, the bridge is out, and my Moon Zoomy digistruct stations are out of commission, thanks to some arsehole Scav called Deadlift."

"Scav?" the double asked.

"Scavenger," I said. "Local name for the arsehole bandits here."

"Got it in one, Dick," Janey said cheerfully. "I'm not much of a fighter: it's been all I could do to fight off the Scavs Deadlift has sent after me before. But if you could do me a favour, I can get you a Moon Zoomy to get across to Concordia. My Fast-Travel Station is busted, otherwise, I would have used that. Deadlift has the digistruct key for the Moon Zoomy. Plus, he's an arsehole who didn't take kindly to me when I said I wasn't into men."

"Ah," the double said. "Sorry about the flirting earlier."

"It's fine," Janey said, waving off the apology. "Anyway, Deadlift was a convict once imprisoned by Zarpedon. Nasty bugger. Kill him, get the digistruct key, and then we can all get to Concordia."

* * *

We were checking our equipment before our expedition to kill Deadlift and retrieve the digistruct key. I was looking over our Oz Kits when Janey approached me. "God…you've changed, Dick."

"It's Zagreus now," I said quietly. I then began singing, quietly.

 _Zagreus sits inside your head,_

 _Zagreus lives among the dead,_

 _Zagreus sees you in your bed_

 _And eats you when you're sleeping(_ _2)_ …

"Wow…that…was creepy as hell," Janey said.

I chuckled. "You don't know the half of it. You remember me being in the Sci-Zone. Imagine what it's like for me to be in it, 24/7. All that information sleeting through my head. The reason I'm not hammy all the time is because it's exhausting…but almost all of my morals died when Richard Snyder did. Screaming for his parents. Screaming for Angel."

"Angel?"

"Oh, that's right. She didn't go to our school. She was, frankly, my only friend." I turned to her. "Zagreus is another name for Dionysus, a god of insanity. Atlas wanted a monster…and that's what they got. They called me the Sword-Dancer, Mr Hyde, the Bloody Blade of the Crimson Lance, the Male Lance Assassin."

"And you helped Athena and the Vault Hunters oust General Knoxx."

I chuckled ruefully. "Yeah. Poor old Knoxxie. I wish we didn't have to kill him. He was one of the saner officers in the entire Crimson Lance. He was a nice guy when he wasn't trying to kill us, and frankly, he had a point about the higher-ups. But he was willing to do his duty until he was finished with his mission on Pandora. And that meant trying to kill us. I take issue when people try to kill my friends and family. Atlas tricked me into killing my parents…and put out a hit on my sister and I." I leaned forward confidentially. "By the way, she doesn't really get into flirting while on a mission. Wait till it's over, and then make your move."

"Wait, you mean she's into girls?"

"Yeah. So am I, but I need to find the right woman." I grinned, although it felt somewhat hollow. "Anyway, once this is all over, then feel free to approach her. Or else, you know, try to be a shoulder to lean on when bad shit happens. I'm not the most comforting of people, you see, being a bloodthirsty nutjob."

She nodded, before peering at an electronic port on my temple, half-hidden by my hair. She whistled. "Nice cyberneural port."

"Thanks," I said. "That's part of how they turned my Sci-Zone on 24/7. I sometimes just plug a music player in, but I can do some instinctive programming in here. I could probably lobotomise an AI core within seconds if I had it plugged in. No wireless, though. Don't want to be prey to every malware out there on the ECHOnet."

* * *

 _"It was almost like I was Richard Snyder again, meeting Janey," I said ruefully to Lilith. "She's a nice girl. I think Athena will be very happy with her. Assuming we all get out of this alive."_

Don't worry, Ricky. You will, _came a voice into my head._

 _"Thanks for the comfort, but I know harsh reality."_

 _"Who're you speaking to?"_

 _"Spoilers. I haven't gotten to that part of the story yet. Anyway, you know damn well who I'm speaking to. I told you earlier. Let's just say I need all the Happiness in my head I can get…"_

 **CHAPTER 3 ANNOTATIONS:**

 **So, they've made it to Elpis, and present-day Ricky has someone in his head. A bit of foreshadowing there. Who is it? Wouldn't you like to know… (Though there's a few clues already)**

 **I skipped over a lot of the crap on Helios because I wanted to get to Elpis quicker. That, and, like Zagreus, I'm crap at writing battle scenes.**

 **1\. Keep in mind that Zagreus hasn't seen Janey since they were kids, and Janey wouldn't have given any signs of her orientation then, obviously. He probably thought of her as a tomboy.**

 **2\. This is the first verse of the Zagreus nursery rhyme, which is used as an arc theme throughout many of the early releases of the** ** _Doctor Who_** **Big Finish audios.**


	20. Opening the Cage Chapter 1

_**OPENING THE CAGE**_

 **CHAPTER 1:**

 **ONCE UPON A TIME ON PANDORA…**

"So, you wanna hear a story, huh?"

The man who said this was rotund, with an apparently jovial demeanour and a goatee. He spoke with a Slavic accent. His manner of dress was well-worn, and compared to his guests, rather slovenly.

"Actually, we wanted to tell one," said one of his guests, a woman. She and the man were dressed rather oddly for the place. Immaculate tan suits (very conspicuous on Pandora), with the woman having a long skirt instead of trousers. They both had red hair, and the same mildly attractive but somewhat bland features. They could have been twins. In a way, that was both what they were, and what they weren't.

"Perhaps we could tell one together," the male twin said.

"Preferably without elaboration. After all, it is already a fantastic tale," the woman said.

"No elaboration required," the male twin concluded.

The rotund man frowned. His name was Marcus Kincaid, a man of many professions, like bus driver, story teller, and arms dealer. He was currently sitting in a back room in his store at New Haven. He had been asked by these two, who had appeared, to come with them out the back. They mentioned the story of the Vault Hunters, of the downfall of Atlas and part of Hyperion…

Of the five Vault Hunters, and the two Girls of Destiny.

Marcus frowned. "But what would be the point of the three of us telling a story if we all know about it?"

"The thing is, we know things about the story that you don't," the man said.

"About how it truly begins, and what things they may not have told you," the woman said.

"After all, you know what they say."

"The onlooker sees most of the game."

Marcus peered at the two. They were far from the strangest people on Pandora. Even in New Haven, you had Scooter, who was brilliant at anything mechanical, but little more than a braying redneck at anything else. And Marcus still considered him a son, as he had helped Moxxi raise him and his sister after they fled the Hodunk clan and Moxxi married him. Then there was Dr Zed, a rather ethically questionable doctor rumoured to do various dubious experiments. And, of course, there were the Vault Hunters.

Still, there was something about these two that set Marcus' instincts screaming. These two weren't dangerous per se, but there was something highly disturbing about them.

"Well," Marcus began, "before we continue any further, how about we introduce ourselves? I'm Marcus Kincaid, venture merchant."

 **MARCUS KINCAID**

 **As Jovial As He Is Tightfisted**

"Robert Lutece," the male twin said.

"Rosalind Lutece," the woman said.

"We are physicists," Robert said.

"And we are ghosts," Rosalind said.

"Schrödinger's twin children."

"Neither dead nor alive, technically speaking."

"Everywhere…"

"And nowhere."

 **ROSALIND AND ROBERT LUTECE**

 **Never Metaphysicist I Liked**

Marcus blinked at the double act that they performed. Eventually, he said, "Well, would you like a drink as we tell our tale?"

"We would love one, thank you," Robert said.

"Preferably good drink," Rosalind cautioned. "I'd prefer to treasure my brain cells, even if they are in a quantum indeterminate state."

Marcus wasn't sure what to make of it. Normally, he would have palmed off some of Scooter's latest batch of moonshine onto these two, but he decided to break out the good stuff, pouring out into his finest glasses…with only one or two chips on them. "I am curious, though. How do you know how the story begins?"

"Because we began it ourselves," Robert said.

"And we have tried to finish it. I guess being here is a happy ending, of a sort," Rosalind said.

"Even being here on a hellhole planet?" Robert asked.

"Better than Columbia."

"Since when were you the optimist, sister?" Robert asked.

"I don't know. But it is better than ending in the river, or in Rapture."

"Come, come, friends, let's not waste any more time," Marcus said, smiling. "If you know how the story begins, then let's begin it, eh?"

 _Hmm, where to begin?_

 _I supposed that it began with me, with my research into quantum physics. Into means that could make a city float in the clouds._

 _I see your astonishment, Mr Kincaid. Keep in mind that Columbia, the city in question, was established in 1893._

 _…You've dropped your drink. Shame. That wasn't a bad glass. And the alcohol is pretty good too. I could probably use it to sterilise laboratory instruments. I'm glad I don't see any smoke or bubbling rising from that spilled drink._

 _Yes, I know it sounds impossible to you. But we come from another timeline, and well before humanity ever turned its eye to colonising Pandora. I am sure that most people of my time would be astonished at other things, though I daresay citizens of Columbia would be more concerned with the filth around this place than robots and weapons technology._

 _Anyway, to cut a long story short, Columbia was led by a man. He had once been named Booker DeWitt, but after the infamous Massacre at Wounded Knee, he took a baptism, and took a new name: Zachary Hale Comstock. He saw the potential in my work, but there was something about him that festered and grew, a desire for power, and to cleanse the world of what he considered to be sin. Columbia was his own personal kingdom of inequality and injustice._

 _He collaborated with me, along with my brother once I brought him through into our reality, on creating Columbia. But he was obsessed with his legacy, and our technology, able to open Tears, rips in space and time, left him sterile. He opted to take his daughter from an alternate self, one who hadn't accepted the baptism, who remained Booker DeWitt._

 _DeWitt had gotten into debt and drink, and eventually sold his daughter, Anna, to us. But in a fit of remorse, he tried to back out of the deal. It was too late, and all that was left of Anna in his reality was her severed little finger. Such an innocuous thing, and yet, it granted her, by happenstance, the ability to rip open holes in space and time. This made her, in Comstock's eyes, the perfect heir. He isolated her from the world, and killed anyone who knew the truth, even us, though we survived. That's a very long story, and we have a lot to tell otherwise. We are now…quantum ghosts, for want of a better term. Everywhere and nowhere. By that time, we were already intending to try and do penance for what we had done. In our new state, we could begin to do so._

 _Anna was renamed Elizabeth. Booker, in his reality, wallowed in misery, even branding his hand with his daughter's initials as a penance, until the time was right. We opened a Tear, and brought him through. Because of the trauma of being brought through, his mind made up a mission from his prior selling of Anna. He was to bring us the girl, so that he could wipe away the debt. He had no idea that his debt was more of a moral one, as was our own._

 _He made it to Columbia, but Comstock cannily knew enough about his coming, thanks to our machines. The brand on Booker's hand was claimed to be the identifying feature of the False Shepherd. Booker, however, made it to the girl's prison, and managed to free her. By subterfuge, he persuaded her to accompany her, but when they finally made it to an airship, she realised that they were going to New York, rather than the Paris she had been promised. Understandably upset, she knocked him out and fled. After a brief encounter with a certain Miss Daisy Fitzroy, leader of the Vox Populi, Booker pursued Elizabeth. She opened Tear after Tear in order to evade Booker…and that is where things went wrong._

 _In her determination to evade him, she opened a Tear much further in space and time than she had ever done before. How she was able to overcome the effects of the Siphon, a device that limited her powers, eludes me. But she managed it regardless, creating two Tears to the same time, and mostly the same place: namely this planet. Booker ended up on one part of Pandora, and Elizabeth another._

 _And that, Marcus Kincaid, is where the story truly begins…_

It wasn't much of a road, even though it was one of the few in the desert. One of the more noteworthy landmarks was an ancient billboard, falling apart, proclaiming Pandora to be the final destination of any readers. Unfortunately, the creators of the billboard didn't have much of a sense of irony. After all, Pandora was the final destination of many an unfortunate who perished there, from the conditions, or from the wildlife, or from the bandits and malcontents that roamed its surface. Since the Dahl Corporation ceased its mining operations, one of the few reasons anyone came here anymore was because of the rumours of the Vault.

Scrambling through a hole in the billboard was a dog-like reptilian creature called a Skag. It opened its vertical, somewhat yonic mouth, and screeched briefly, before trotting over to the road to sun itself. It realised its mistake a second too late, when the decrepit bus hit it at speed, sending blood spraying everywhere, and turning the skag into an impromptu hood ornament.

The bus was being driven by one Marcus Kincaid, who, as they approached Fyrestone, called back jovially to the passengers, "Okay back there, wake up! It's a fine day, full of opportunity!"

They were an eclectic bunch, these passengers. The first was a thin man who wore a hood on his head with goggles. He had a distinctive goatee, and a strange, bird-like creature perched on his shoulder. A sniper rifle was mounted on his back. His name was Mordecai.

 **MORDECAI AS**

 **THE HUNTER**

 **Loves Shooting, Falconry, and Heavy Drinking**

The second, a woman, was tall, slender and extremely pale, with blue tattoo-like markings on her skin. Her hair was fiery red, and her eyes golden, like a hawk's. Despite her petite frame and beautiful looks, there was the sense of a hidden danger, especially to any who knew that the markings on her skin were the mark of a Siren, human women born with extraordinary powers. And Lilith was not someone you wanted to mess with.

 **DR LILITH CASHLIN(** **1)** **AS**

 **THE SIREN**

 **Beautiful. Brainy. Bellicose.**

The third occupant was a soldier, in what looked like a modified version of the Crimson Lance, the PMC wing of the Atlas Corporation. His dark skin and muscled body contrasted with his thoughtful eyes. He went by the name of Roland.

 **ROLAND AS**

 **THE SOLDIER**

 **Doesn't Like to Sound His Own Horn(** **2)**

The fourth was a big, massive, brutal and scarred lump of a man, nothing less than a hulking mass of muscle. Appropriately enough, his name was Brick.

 **BRICK AS**

 **THE BERSERKER**

 **Likes Pounding People and Petting Puppies**

The last man on the bus was a grim-looking man of indeterminate age, brown-haired and handsome, but with a scowl perpetually marring his features. His clothes looked out of place here, seemingly coming from another time. The gun he wielded was ancient technology by this time, and yet, he seemed almost at home amongst these people. His name was Booker DeWitt.

 **BOOKER DEWITT AS**

 **THE PINKERTON**

 **A Man Out Of Time, But Not Out Of Place**

With the exception of Booker, they were all Vault Hunters. Fortune seekers. Mercenaries looking for a big haul.

But Booker had another aim in mind. Survival would be better with these people than away from it. But he still had Elizabeth to find. He didn't know if it was possible to bring her back to New York now. Hell, if his debtors couldn't find him, then it may be a moot point.

But this was a harsh place, and he didn't know where she was. And he'd be damned if he left her in the lurch.

Sirens wailed as the two girls ran through the rough and rocky landscape of Thousand Cuts, trying to evade their pursuers. Both of them were in their late teens, both of them dark-haired, and both of them beautiful. One of them was thin, perhaps too thin, her exposed skin showing blue tattoo-like markings. Her hair was short, almost shaved on one side, with metallic implants showing, while the other side was long. Her eyes were a pale icy blue that glowed faintly with an inner light. Her name was Angel Clarke(3), and she had just escaped her father's imprisonment.

 **ANGEL CLARKE AS**

 **THE GUARDIAN ANGEL SIREN**

 **Only Now Spreading Her Wings**

The other was dressed in a vaguely Victorian style, with a white blouse and a long blue skirt. Her hourglass figure was the result of both her petite body and a corset that was now proving to be something of a hindrance. Like her comrade, she had black hair and blue eyes, though her blue eyes were darker blue. Her name was Elizabeth.

 **ELIZABETH COMSTOCK AS**

 **THE TEAR-MAKER**

 **She Rips Space And Time A New Orifice!**

They took shelter behind a rock, panting from the exertions of the last hour or so, given the escape and all it entailed. Elizabeth's own jailbreak had been exhausting enough, but breaking Angel out of her own prison was even more so. And they had been running almost non-stop. Elizabeth had supported Angel for much of the way, as Angel's muscles had deteriorated during her imprisonment.

"Do you think we've gone far enough?" Elizabeth asked as she got her breath back.

Angel shook her head. "Nowhere on this planet is far enough…but we can at least put some distance between us and this place. We need to get to a Fast-Travel Station." She looked at her saviour, astonished. "What were those abilities? Why did you help me?"

"I don't know about my abilities," Elizabeth said quietly. "But I know about cages. I don't like seeing people in cages. Where do we head to?"

"I have a few ideas. Maybe Fyrestone, or New Haven. Probably the former. I have to warn the Vault Hunters that have arrived. About Atlas's interest in the Vault…and my father's interest in it."

"Lead the way, then," Elizabeth said, and she followed her fellow fugitive as they scrambled across the rocks of Thousand Cuts, fleeing from cages…

 **CHAPTER 1 ANNOTATIONS:**

 **A good start, don't you think? Hopefully, it can continue from that.**

 **As I mentioned in my foreword, this is a more experimental fic, which will be updated relatively infrequently. By experimental, I mean that I am doing a story that has a concept that intrigues me, but will be put on the backburner. I will update this story later. Don't worry about that.**

 **1\. Dr Lilith Cashlin was, apparently, meant to be Lilith's full name, according to the Borderlands Wiki.**

 **2\. Roland is also the name of the protagonist of** ** _The Song of Roland_** **, a medieval epic poem about a knight who dies in glorious battle. He refuses to sound a horn to call in reinforcements until he is dying. Given how attention-shy Roland is in the opening of the original** ** _Borderlands_** **, I thought I'd make a reference to that as well.**

 **3\. In my Ballad of Ricky and Angel series of** ** _Borderlands_** **stories, I decided to give Angel and Jack the last name of Clarke, after Handsome Jack's voice actor, Dameon Clarke.**


	21. Opening the Cage Chapter 2

_**OPENING THE CAGE**_

 **CHAPTER 2:**

 **REUNION IN FYRESTONE**

In a flare of cyan light, the quiet of Fyrestone in the morning was disturbed when the Fast-Travel Station activated, and two girls in their late teens appeared. Elizabeth shook her head, blinking. "That was a novel experience," she said.

"I don't think I've ever used Fast-Travel before either," Angel said quietly.

"Well, that's interesting," came a voice from not far away, from within a building right next to the Fast-Travel Station. They whirled to face a grizzled man, perhaps in his fifties or sixties, dressed in a surgeon's smock and with a surgical mask over his face. He was tapping a buzz-axe against the palm of his hand as he approached them, a scowl on what could be seen of his face. "You two have ten seconds to explain what the hell you're doing here."

"It's a long story. We're fugitives," Angel said. "I just escaped from a Hyperion facility in Thousand Cuts. Elizabeth here helped me."

"Thousand Cuts? I didn't think the Fast-Travel Station here could go there," the man said suspiciously.

"Not normally, no. And it won't again for a little while."

The man peered at Angel, before he noted her markings. "You're a Siren, aren't you?" he asked, genuinely curious.

"Yes." Angel peered at the man. "Wait…are you Dr Zed?"

"Well, I sure as hell ain't my brothers," Dr Zed said.

 **DOCTOR ZED**

 **Licence to Maim**

"Brothers?" Angel asked, bemused. "I thought you only had one: Ned, who works for Jakobs."

"We don't talk about Ted(1)," Zed said. Suddenly, there was a roar of engines in the distance, and his eyes widened. "Shit! Nine-Toes must be sending his next raid! Get inside! And no funny business! Or I'll show you why I lost my medical licence!"

* * *

"So, what's your story?" Lilith asked, peering at the man sitting next to her on the bus.

"It's a long one," Booker said. "And I don't think you'd believe me."

"Well, those guns you're wielding…given the wood, I'd normally say that they're a Jakobs'. Except they would also have the Jakobs' logo. And they don't look like Jakobs' style anyway. Hell, they look like they belong in an antique shop. Early 20th century, maybe late 19th," Lilith said, frowning. "Ditto your clothes. And you haven't been on Pandora that long. Your clothes aren't dusty enough. Got a lot of blood on them, though. And relatively fresh blood, at that. You've been in a gunfight not long ago, I'd bet."

Booker cursed her perceptiveness. He had stumbled across the bus-stop where these four were waiting, a few minutes after falling through the Tear Elizabeth created. With Elizabeth nowhere in sight (and she seemed to go through another Tear anyway), he decided that his best chance for survival, at least until he could find a way to track down Elizabeth. Always assuming that she had ended up anywhere near here. What little he had seen of her destination through her Tear (before his momentum sent him through the Tear she had opened in front of him) showed the interior of a building, albeit no building he had ever seen. Even the interior of Monument Island, with all its technological paraphernalia, had nothing on what he glimpsed.

Wherever she was, it was doubtlessly nowhere near this place.

He had refrained from asking questions about this place. He knew that, wherever he was, it was a long way away from Columbia. And given what he had seen, he wasn't sure when he was. Especially when that bus, like no other he had ever seen, pulled up. He was accepted as a Vault Hunter by the fat man driving the bus, Marcus, but the others clearly didn't think so, though they had done the courtesy of giving him their names. But he hadn't seen clothing like theirs before, and he was beginning to think that, like Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee or HG Wells' protagonist(2), he was either in a delirium, or else in another time.

Given what else he had seen, like a city in the clouds, gigantic bird-like automatons, the Vigors, and Elizabeth's abilities, time travel was surprisingly easy to accept. Of course, whether these others would was another matter.

Eventually, he said, "I'm a private detective. I was hired to free a girl from prison and bring her back to New York."

"New York? On Old Earth?" Roland asked, his keen eyes piercing into Booker's own.

"Yes. She was imprisoned by a religious fanatic by the name of Comstock. I didn't know it, but the girl had…abilities. Long story short, though I freed her from prison, I lied to her about where I was taking her. She reacted badly, and we ended up…where is this place, anyway?"

"Pandora," Lilith said, frowning. "How could you not know?"

"Yeah, well, she opened up a hole in space. I don't know where I ended up. That's how I met you guys."

"I call bullshit," Brick said. "How can a girl open up a hole in space?"

"Quiet," Lilith said. She then turned back to Booker. "The girl, did she have these?" She indicated the blue markings on her body.

"I don't know," Booker said. "She had enough clothing on, I couldn't see them if she did. Why?"

"You tellin' me that you don't know about Sirens?" Mordecai asked.

"Well, I know about the ones from Greek myth," Booker said.

Mordecai whistled. "Man, you're out of touch. Sirens, women with weird powers and blue tattoos? Those ones?"

"I sort of kept to myself," Booker said. "I have a drinking problem."

"Again, I call bullshit," Brick remarked.

"You can call bullshit all you want," Booker said coolly. "I'm not here to look for the Vault, whatever the hell that is. I'm here to find her, assuming she's still on this planet. I'm only sticking with you guys because there's safety in numbers."

Mordecai frowned. "Don't you know about the Vault?"

"Like I said, I sort of kept to myself."

"It's only one of the biggest rumours around," Mordecai said, rolling his eyes behind his goggles.

It was then that Roland spoke up, turning in his seat and looking at Booker. "Some time ago, the Atlas Corporation discovered a vast cache of alien weaponry and technology on the planet Promethea. It's a shithole of a planet, and I know because I did two tours on it with the Crimson Lance before I went AWOL."

"Shot your superior officer is what I heard," Lilith said with a smirk. "Anyway, the point is, that was the first Vault to be found. Supposedly, it was a cache of tech left behind by the Eridians, an ancient race of aliens. So when rumours of another Vault start circulating, people get excited."

"Like a gold rush," Booker murmured.

"Yeah, I guess you could say that," Lilith said. "Weapons, money, fame…besides, Pandora needs mercenaries like us. It's frankly a shithole of a planet. Not as much as Promethea, but, well, it's a hard frontier, like the Old West back on Earth. Hell, you wouldn't look out of place there."

Booker had to wonder whether Lilith was just remarking on his clothes, or trying to fish for information. She was clearly the smartest one there. He merely grunted.

Lilith then looked over to the bus driver. "Hey, Marcus, do you have a spare ECHO device?"

"Sure, if the price if right."

Booker fumbled around in his pockets, and then walked carefully up the aisle of the bus, and handed Marcus a silver eagle dollar. Marcus looked briefly at the coin in the one hand, before he bit it. "Real silver," he muttered(3). He spared Booker an incredulous glance, before returning his gaze to the road ahead. "How many of those do you have?"

"A few hundred."

"Give me a hundred, and the ECHO device is all yours."

Booker was sure that he was getting ripped off, but he handed over the coins regardless. He then strapped on the device. Lilith helped him switch it on, and he got the feeling she suspected the truth, or at least part of it. He didn't know whether to be disturbed or relieved. He found it surprisingly easy to understand how to use. He could call up a map, as well as something not unlike a telephone system.

Suddenly, it beeped, and at first, Booker wondered if he had done something wrong, only for the others to get the same noise. "Emergency broadcast signal," Roland said.

Lilith frowned as she looked at the data. "But it's been specifically targeted to us."

" _That's right_ ," came the voice of a young woman. Booker, for a moment, thought it might have been Elizabeth, an impression reinforced when the image of a blue-eyed and dark-haired girl in her late teens appeared. But he soon realised that this girl was far too thin, and her hair was asymmetrical, with metal implants in the temple exposed by the shorter hair, and the longer hair apparently blowing in some wind. And the voice was different, with a weary edge even Elizabeth didn't have. " _I'm sorry for hijacking your ECHO devices, but we're running out of time. You're nearly at Fyrestone, which is being attacked by bandits. We need your help, Vault Hunters. In exchange, I have vital information about the Vault._ "

"I'll drop you guys off when we get to the Fyrestone stop," Marcus said. "We're coming up to it now."

"Wait, who are you?" Lilith asked. "How do you know we're Vault Hunters?"

" _It's a very long story, Lilith_ ," the young woman said. " _I'd rather not say over an unsecured line. There's three of us, four if you count a Claptrap unit. Get rid of those bandits, and you'll have the answers you seek._ " Her image faded from the ECHO devices, just as Marcus slowed the bus to a stop.

"End of the line," he said, looking at them. "If you want to get off here, do so. Hey, if you manage to kill enough bandits, I'll re-open my franchise here. They're bad for business."

Booker didn't say anything, merely getting off the bus with the others. A shame that wasn't Elizabeth. But then again, he doubted that Elizabeth would be glad to see him…

* * *

Zed scratched his head. The three of them, plus Fyrestone's resident Claptrap unit, were hiding out in his clinic. The robot was cowering in a corner, while the three humans squatted between some shelves, out of sight from the windows. "So…what you're saying is, that you're the daughter of some Hyperion programmer and low-level surveillance supervisor, who's kept you imprisoned as his personal top hacker and system administrator?"

"That about sums it up," Angel said. "My Siren powers, my Phase-shift, gives me the ability to manipulate virtually any electronic system. The only reasons why Dad could keep me prisoner were that he was an excellent programmer, and knew how to stop me from hacking my security systems, and he used a control collar." She touched her neck unconsciously. "If it weren't for Elizabeth, I'd have been stuck there(4)."

"Well, that's what we in the medical profession like to call FUBAR," Zed remarked after a moment's contemplation, with considerable understatement.

"Foo-bah?" Elizabeth asked, her eyebrows knotting.

"Fucked Up Beyond All Repair," Zed explained. "Have you lived a sheltered life, Miss?"

"You could say that," Elizabeth said. "Like Angel, I know what it's like to grow up in a cage with strange powers."

Zed blinked. "Wait, are you a Siren too?"

"I don't have those markings, if that's what you mean," Elizabeth said. After a moment's contemplation, she decided to tell the truth. "I can open Tears in space, to other worlds and times. Other universes, you would say."

Zed's eyebrows met his hairline. "Y'know something? You're either crazy, or telling the truth. That'd have to be a pretty unbelievable lie, anyway. Do you come from another time?"

"The year 1912. I know I must be centuries into the future…though I've never made it this far before. I don't know how to get back. Then again, I'm not sure I want to. Does the name Columbia mean anything to you? Or Zachary Hale Comstock?"

"Columbia? I've heard of the South American country on Old Earth, and then there's that colony a few systems away…but I'm guessing you don't mean either. As for Comstock, never heard of him."

"Then we must be in another timeline entirely," Elizabeth said. "Columbia was a flying city."

"In 1912?" Zed asked. "God, must've been one hell of a timeline. But you don't want to go back, do you?"

"Columbia looked nice, but there was a lot of rot underneath. There was a man, trying to get me out of there. A detective, called Booker. He claimed he was going to take me to Paris, like I wanted. But he was actually going to take me to New York, so I fled from him. I tried to open up a Tear so far from him, he couldn't follow, and I tried to use a Tear to send him far from Columbia. I don't know where he is." Elizabeth pursed her lips. "For all his deceit and brutality, he at least tried to care, I think."

Angel frowned, before going over to the ECHO device she had used to call the Vault Hunters for help. She murmured, "Phase-shift activated." Her eyes briefly glowed, before the small screen of the device lit up. "When my father was planning to manipulate the Vault Hunters, he only thought that a specific group of four would be best. Dr Lilith Cashlin, Roland, Mordecai, and Brick. But a fifth member is with them. His was amongst the small group of active ECHO devices that I accessed." She showed Elizabeth a screenshot. "Is this Booker?"

Elizabeth scowled, before nodding. "Let me guess, he's on his way with the Vault Hunters?"

"Yes. I'm sorry, Elizabeth."

Elizabeth sighed. "No, don't be. We needed help. I don't know how to use a gun. I'm not sure I want to learn. And…"

Her sentence was cut off by gunshots, and then, a bandit yelled, "Get them!"

"Time to pound some meat puppies!" howled a Psycho(5).

"Shoot them all!" another bandit snarled.

Gunshots rang out for a number of seconds, before silence fell again. Then, a fist rapped on the door. "Hey, is anyone in there?" a woman's voice asked.

"That's Lilith's voice," Angel said, before calling out, "Is it safe yet, Lilith?"

"The bandits are all dead," came the deep voice of Roland. "Are you the one who sent the distress signal?"

"Yes. Just a moment," Angel said, going over to the door. Before she did so, she murmured, "Phase-shift activated." She then looked at the others. "It's them, the ECHO signatures are the same, and they're transmitting life-signs."

"Well, what are we waiting for?" Claptrap, who, up until now, remained silent (save for frightened babbling), was now up and trundling towards the door. The rhomboid, yellow robot then opened it. "Greetings, travellers! This Claptrap unit offers thanks for seeing off those bandits. Wow, that's a lot of bodies!"

Indeed, there were. Elizabeth grimaced at seeing the various corpses strewn around the ground. Her one consolation was that, unlike the military and police that Booker had killed, or Slate's fanatical followers, these men were most definitely criminals, intent on theft if not murder or rape.

She looked at her saviours. Booker, she barely glanced at, though she didn't fail to notice a look that mixed surprise and relief. He was actually relieved to find her alive and well.

She noted the red-haired woman with similar markings to Angel, the one who must be Lilith. There was the dark-skinned man. The thin man with the beard and the hood, and a bird-like creature perched on his shoulder. And the big, muscled hulk.

Lilith stepped forward, peering at Angel. "So, our mystery caller is a Siren. I wondered if I'd ever meet another one. You have a name?"

"Angel Clarke. This girl is Elizabeth, though one of your party already knows her. And this guy is Dr Zed."

"And I am a CL4P-TP steward robot," Claptrap said. "But you can call me Claptrap!"

 **CLAPTRAP**

 **Annoying Little Rhombus, Isn't He?**

"You said you had some info about the Vault. Vital information, you said," Roland said. "Well?"

"Inside," Angel said. "You never know if the bandits might get bold again."

As the Vault Hunters filed inside, Booker caught Elizabeth's eyes. "Save your breath, Mr DeWitt," Elizabeth said with a scowl. "We'll talk later."

Booker nodded. "Well, getting to New York or Paris IS a moot point by now, don't you think?"

"I guess. I don't know whether we can go back. So we'd better get used to it, shouldn't we?"

"I'm already used to this sort of thing," Booker said. "It's you I'm worried about."

Elizabeth bit back the retort that formed on her lips. He was right, after all. He had said he was in the Pinkertons, that he had fought at Wounded Knee with the army. He had been in this sort of situation before.

But that didn't mean she would fail the trials Pandora would throw in her path. Especially given what Angel had told her, about the Vault, and her father…

 **CHAPTER 2 ANNOTATIONS:**

 **And another chapter down. I hope you guys are enjoying this. I've already got some follows.**

 **Like with** ** _Hooked on a Feeling_** **, I'm putting Angel's age in the original** ** _Borderlands_** **as 19, the same age as her live-action actress was at the time of the release of** ** _Borderlands_** **. It's rather appropriate, considering that Elizabeth is the same age, or about that, at the time of** ** _BioShock Infinite_** **.**

 **Quick review-answering. Sorry,** **Darkstar248** **, but Krieg won't make an appearance. As for his Action Skill, I haven't decided on one. Booker using Vigors makes him badass enough already. I agree about Elizabeth's Action Skill.**

 **mattman65** **: I have no plans for any such thing. Nor do I want to. Pulling together so many characters is just asking for trouble.**

 **1\. I'm assuming here that Zed and Ned are two different characters. It's a big, but not unreasonable assumption, given that TK Baha mentions that there are three brothers in the first Headhunter DLC of** ** _Borderlands 2_** **.**

 **2\. Both were time-travelling fictional protagonists prior to 1912, and Booker could conceivably have read these books.**

 **3\. I'd imagine that Columbia, unlike most of the world, would have minted its coinage in precious metals. I've made an assumption here, but not that big a one.**

 **4\. I reckon Angel wasn't given the Eridium injectors until** ** _after_** **Jack got a hold of the Vault Key, so by the time of** ** _Borderlands_** **, while imprisoned, she wasn't actually in danger of dying if she was freed.**

 **5\. Okay, there weren't actually any Psychos when you first arrive in Fyrestone, but I put them in anyway.**


	22. Opening the Cage Chapter 3

_**OPENING THE CAGE**_

 **CHAPTER 3:**

 **THE TRUTH ABOUT THE VAULT**

 _So, you want to hear a story, huh?_

 _…Sorry, I've seen Marcus do it a few times. I wanted to try doing that._

 _It's the tale of a man called John Clarke, and his daughter, Angel._

 _Now, Angel was special. She was born a Siren. You know what a Siren is, right?_

 _…Of course you do. Now, Angel had the ability to manipulate electronics at will. She first opened up an electronically-locked cupboard to get cookies._

 _Now, John was, at first, delighted. He was so proud of his daughter. But over time, pride turned into something else. And as Angel's abilities grew, he became afraid that she would get out of his control. So he imprisoned her, and then controlled her, made her kill her own mother._

 _I shouldn't go over every single detail of my life…I mean, her life. Damn, it's hard speaking in the third person._

 _Now, John was primarily a programmer for Hyperion, but he rose to do work on Hyperion's satellite systems and surveillance programs. And that was how he first came to learn about the Vault._

 _I don't know how he learned what he did, but he's learned far more than even the top expert on Eridian artifacts on Pandora. Who's Dr Patricia Tannis, by the way, a neurotic archaeologist and scientist employed by Dahl._

 _Anyway, John, or rather, Jack, learned that not only was the Vault ready to be opened for the first time in two centuries, but that it contained an immensely powerful creature, rather than the riches one would think. He also knew that vast reserves of Eridium awaited the one who vanquished the creature._

 _So he formulated a plan. Tannis had already leaked information about the Vault on Pandora on the ECHOnet. He intended to use the most competent-looking Vault Hunters to track down the disparate pieces of the Vault Key. He was going to have his daughter pose as a Guardian Angel, to guide the Vault Hunters. And then, have them destroy the monster within the Vault, or else weaken it so that he could finish it off._

 _But then, shortly before his plan could begin, a rift opened right near Angel's prison. And a girl her age stepped through. She used the same rifts to bypass security measures, and free Angel from her prison. This girl's name was Elizabeth, and like Angel, she had strange abilities for much of her life. Using the holes in space and time, the two girls managed to flee, even as Jack began to scream and rant and swear vengeance on them, even as he begged his formerly-imprisoned daughter to return to him._

* * *

Mordecai frowned. "So…the Vault was a set-up? You were going to be leading us on a goose-chase for Daddy?"

"Unwillingly," Angel said, jabbing a finger at her own neck. "I had a control collar on my neck. And a script. I mean, a _script_. A literal printed script to read from. With handwritten notes. Dad wants the Eridium inside the Vault. But apparently there's a homicidal tentacled abomination within it as well. Now, unfortunately, from what I saw, Atlas is interested in the new Vault as well, and if they unleashed what was within…"

"Should we bother warning them?" Zed asked.

"I doubt they would listen, even to a former Hyperion…" Angel thought for a moment, before plumping for "…well, 'employee'." She even did air-quotes. "I mean, Atlas _is_ a corporation whose PMC is led by a five-year old."

"Wait, Admiral Mikey is real?" Mordecai asked, incredulously.

"Oh, believe me, he is real," Roland said. "He's a nice kid, don't get me wrong, but his 'advisors' are idiots who wouldn't know military strategy if it bit them on the ass. And they're the ones making the decisions, ultimately. And of course, Commandant Steele would probably be in charge of the Atlas forces here. To call her obstinate would be like calling an ocean wet. She'd sooner have us shot than listen to us, especially if the source is from Hyperion."

"Is there anyone on this planet who might be helpful?" Lilith asked.

"Helena Pierce at New Haven, though she's more concerned with keeping the town safe than helping with the Vault," Angel said.

Zed nodded. "Yeah, Pierce is a good woman. If we do see her, though, don't comment on her looks. She was given a Skag-pearl ring by her husband, which emitted hunger-inducing pheromones in a group of nearby Skags. He died in the attack. I patched her up as good as I could, but…"

"I've seen more than my fair share of scars," Booker said quietly.

"Dr Tannis herself can be a good ally, but we need to get her away from Atlas' influence. She used to work for Dahl before they pulled out of Pandora completely, and Atlas is now covertly funding her," Angel said. "Then there's Mad Moxxi and her son, Scooter. Marcus can be trusted, as long as there's a profit in for him, if only from arms dealing. Of course, none of them will be able to stop Atlas if they wanted to, even if they combined forces."

"So how would we be supposed to?" Mordecai asked.

"Simple. We play a little game called 'let's you and him fight'. We get the pieces to the Vault Key first. We then set Atlas and Hyperion against each other. Hyperion doesn't have anywhere near as big a PMC presence as Atlas does, but it has enough invested in Pandora that it will fight Atlas if it comes to it. Our job will be to keep the Vault Key, as well as the regular citizens of Pandora, safe while Atlas and Hyperion decimate each other."

"You seem to have this all planned out," Roland said, his eyes narrowing.

"Actually, I made it up while Elizabeth and I were fleeing from my prison. I've watched a few movies on the ECHOnet, and I have to say, I'm taking a leaf from _Yojimbo_ and _A Fistful of Dollars_ here(1). My Dad plans to ascend to the top at Hyperion, he wants to topple Tassiter, and for all the fact that Tassiter is an asshole of the highest order, I know my Dad will be even worse."

"Who's Tassiter?" Booker asked.

"The CEO of Hyperion," Lilith explained. "The boss. And from what I heard, he _is_ an asshole."

"Lilith, why are you explaining what a CEO is?" Mordecai asked.

"Because I've got the feeling he doesn't know what it means." She turned to Elizabeth. "You, Elizabeth, you claim that you can open holes in space and time?"

Elizabeth nodded, and by way of a demonstration, gestured with her arms, as if opening a curtain. A wave of white energy expanded in front of them, and they saw through to outside, in Fyrestone, where bandits were capering and getting drunk, whereas there could only be corpses outside. Zed was horrified when he saw his mutilated corpse hanging off a water tower. The whole thing seemed to flicker with static, and the colours seemed washed out. Lilith could tell, though, that this was no mere hologram. Her Phasewalk ability allowed her to move in another dimension, and the senses relating to this ability were _screaming_.

"In another world, right here and right now, they've overrun Fyrestone completely," Elizabeth said quietly.

"Dayum," Brick said quietly. "This is another timeline?"

Elizabeth nodded, before closing the Tear. She then said, to Zed, "Sorry. I didn't mean to upset you."

"Eh, I've seen worse things than my own corpse," Zed said. "You should see some of the things my brother cooked up."

"That was a trick, right?" Mordecai asked.

Lilith shook her head. "Believe me, Mordecai, I know dimensional changes. That was definitely no hologram." She looked at Elizabeth, and then at Booker. "And you guys are either pretty dedicated historical re-enactors, or else you're from the past. Then again, I doubt that even a dedicated re-enactor has real silver currency. And unless those guns are good replicas, no way in hell would you use antiques like those in battle unless they were pretty much brand-new."

"You're saying you believe her story?" Roland asked. He wasn't sounding sceptical, rather, his tone had a 'I want to wait and see' attitude to it.

"Like hell," Mordecai muttered.

"Believe it or not, I'm not going back where I came from," Elizabeth said, looking at Booker pointedly. "I'm not even sure I can, even if I wanted to. Like Angel, I was caged and exploited for my abilities. My…adoptive father was a man who claimed to be a prophet. I think he just used my own abilities, though I don't know for sure. He did so to see the future."

Booker looked at his branded hand. "So that's how the bastard knew I was coming. That's how he knew about all those things in my past(2)."

"Probably," Elizabeth conceded.

"Well, I know Booker can handle himself in a firefight," Roland said. "But what about you two?"

"I'm good at taking cover, picking locks, and performing first aid, but if there are any Tears nearby, I can use them to bring supplies and things through," Elizabeth said.

"And I can control anything electronic," Angel said. "Preferably, they need to be Hyperion tech, but anything with sophisticated enough electronics, I can meddle with. ECHO devices, robots, electronic locks, you name it."

Booker nodded. "I can't speak for Angel, but Elizabeth was real handy in a firefight. She'd toss me new guns and ammo when I was about to run out. She has qualms against killing, but she'll help out. Plus, she's pretty good with improvised weaponry." He rubbed the back of his head. "The lump's still a bit sore."

"You lied to me about taking me to Paris," Elizabeth said archly.

"Wow. That wasn't a good move," Lilith remarked with a chuckle at Booker's expense. "Get a girl's hopes up, and then burst her bubble."

"I was told by my employer to return her to New York, by any means necessary," Booker said. "What would have been better? Lying, or knocking her out and dragging her to the airship? Of course, it seems to be a moot point now."

"Yes, it is," Elizabeth said. "We're now stranded on a world filled with various criminals and mercenaries and greedy businessmen. No offence intended, Dr Zed."

"Some taken," Zed remarked cheerfully.

"So I will trust you, Mr DeWitt, to watch my back, as there is little you can do to take me back to New York."

"Will do," Booker said. "If anything, this place is more familiar to me than New York or Columbia."

"So, where to from here?" Roland asked.

"We'll have to make our way to New Haven, but first, we need other things."

"Like ridding this town of Nine-Toes," Zed said. "That inbred mutant son of a bitch is Sledge's eyes and ears. And Sledge regularly send his bandits to attack us. Frankly, the only people left are myself, Claptrap, and old TK Baha just outside of town."

"In addition, Sledge has one of the components of the Vault Key," Angel said. "The second part is currently in the possession of another bandit warlord by the name of Krom, while the final piece is hidden somewhere along the Trash Coast. At least with Nine-Toes dead, we can weaken Sledge's forces before we stop him for good."

"What about setting Hyperion and Atlas onto each other?" Roland asked with a frown.

Angel had a rather nasty smirk on her face. "Leave that to me. Let's just say that my dad is going to have to work overtime to have any hope of weaselling out of it. Atlas is going to find traces of cyberwarfare and corporate espionage leading back to his computer systems. And Tassiter is not going to be impressed when he finds out not only that, but the rather impressive collection of images on my dad's personal computer. Some of it, I put on there, and some of it, I've just removed most of the encryption."

Brick and Lilith began to laugh. Elizabeth looked bemused. "What do you mean, Angel?"

"Oh, that's right. You grew up in a time without the internet or ECHOnet. Do you know what pornography is?"

Elizabeth blushed, scandalised. Booker smirked in amusement. "You mean you filled your father's files…with titillation and smut?" Elizabeth asked in horror.

"And the worst kind to boot. You saw what he did to me."

Elizabeth blinked, before nodding, conceding the point. "Too good a fate for him."

"Don't worry, it's just the start. But we'll have to get on with our own tasks," Angel said.

"Well, let's get on with it," Roland said, crossing his arms. "There ain't no rest for the wicked…"

 **CHAPTER 3 ANNOTATIONS:**

 **Finally, got this chapter done. And unfortunately, it looks like it's going to be the last one. I simply don't know where to take it from here, and doing a novelisation of** ** _Borderlands_** **with the** ** _BioShock Infinite_** **characters thrown in doesn't appeal to me. So, unless I somehow get a massive flash of inspiration, I'm abandoning this story here. Sorry guys. :(**

 **1\. A reference to two famous films, where a wandering mercenary (a ronin in** ** _Yojimbo_** **, and a gunslinger in** ** _A Fistful of Dollars_** **) sets two warring criminal gangs at each other's throats enough to cause them to wipe each other out, freeing the rest of the townsfolk free from the crime spree.** ** _Yojimbo_** **was inspired by** ** _Red Harvest_** **by Dashiell Hammett, and** ** _Yojimbo_** **inspired** ** _A Fistful of Dollars_** **.**

 **2\. That was a possibility, but then again, we know the real reason why Comstock knew…**


End file.
